Case C — the original: PSY 250 research report
Context (fictional): Lakeside State University — a fictional US public university preparing for ADA Title II digital accessibility compliance. PSY 250 Research Methods in Psychology is a second-year core course with ~120 students. The brief below is realistic but fictional; no real course or student data are used.
The original assignment brief
PSY 250 — Lab Report (30% of course grade)
Task. Write a full research report (2,000 words) on the dataset provided: a fictional study of 150 participants testing whether a brief mindfulness exercise reduces measured anxiety before a public-speaking task. The dataset (CSV on the LMS) includes: condition (mindfulness/control), pre- and post-task anxiety scores, and demographics.
Your report must follow standard structure: Abstract, Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion, References (APA 7).
- Introduction: 2–3 paragraphs positioning the study in the literature.
- Method: describe the design and measures as given.
- Results: report the appropriate statistical test with APA-style statistics and a figure.
- Discussion: interpret, note one limitation, and suggest a follow-up.
- Use at least 6 scholarly references.
Submission. PDF via the LMS, week 12.
Academic integrity. The dataset is provided by the course; analyses must be your own. Quoting statistics software output without interpretation is insufficient. Generative AI tools may not be used for any part of this report.
The original rubric (30 points)
| Criterion | Marks |
|---|---|
| Introduction & literature grounding | 6 |
| Method description (design, measures, procedure) | 5 |
| Results (correct test, APA statistics, figure) | 7 |
| Discussion (interpretation, limitation, follow-up) | 7 |
| Writing & APA formatting | 5 |
What the teaching team actually does with it
- Grading is heavy: ~45 minutes per report across TAs; calibration sessions help but Results-section marking (is the test right? is the figure right?) dominates the time.
- Every semester, a handful of Reports discuss “the mindfulness intervention” with verbatim-identical phrasing across students, and at least one discusses results that are in the file but were never computed by the student.
- The integrity line prohibits AI outright; no one believes it works.
Why this case matters
The lab report is the archetypal “authentic task” — except when the data is provided by the instructor, the authentic part is analysing and writing about data the student has no relationship with. Generative models handle exactly that: provided-data summary in, methods-results-discussion out. The redesign makes the data genuinely the students’ own and grades the decisions, not the prose.
- 1. Original assignment ← you are here
- 2. Stress test
- 3. Redesign
- 4. Student brief
- 5. New rubric
- 6. Faculty notes