Ask The PhD Community | Mar 8 – Let’s Get Ready for the Week

Research and Course Prep

Upload your syllabus, your readings, and your own notes. NotebookLM becomes a private AI that knows only your materials. Ask it to build study guides, generate quiz questions, or create a podcast-style audio summary of any document. Nothing you upload is shared or used to train any model.

Try this before Friday. Upload one journal article you have been putting off. Ask it to summarize the key argument in three sentences and give you five discussion questions for a graduate seminar.

Literature Review

Elicit searches millions of academic papers and pulls structured data from each one. Study design, sample size, findings, limitations. It does not make up citations. It works from real indexed research. A literature review that would take a full week can be scaffolded in an afternoon.

Try this before Friday. Enter a research question you are currently working on. Download the results table. Compare it to what you already have.

Student Support Between Classes

Paste in your course materials and Coursekit builds a custom AI assistant your students can ask questions between sessions. It is not a generic chatbot. It knows your syllabus, your assignments, and your expectations. No code required. Setup takes about fifteen minutes.

Try this before Friday. Paste in your most recent syllabus. Ask the assistant how it would respond to a student emailing at 11 p.m. asking what is due that week.

Grading Feedback and Assignment Design

More than 60 educator-specific tools inside one interface. Rubric builders. Writing feedback generators. A prompt-clarity checker that rewrites your assignment at multiple reading levels. Over two million educators use it. The free tier covers more than most paid platforms offer.

Try this before Friday. Paste an assignment prompt from this semester into the Writing Feedback tool. Ask it to rewrite the prompt at two levels of clarity. Compare all three versions.

Building Reusable Workflows

Anthropic released a 33-page guide this week on building reusable Claude workflows called Skills. Think of it as a recipe book for turning one-off prompts into repeatable processes. If you have a task you do every week, grading a certain type of assignment, drafting feedback emails, summarizing readings, this guide shows you how to turn it into a workflow that runs in seconds next time.

Try this before Friday. Read pages 1 through 10 of the guide. Write down one task you repeat every week. That is your first candidate for a Skill.

Following the OpenAI Pentagon controversy, users shifted to Claude in large numbers. Claude downloads rose 37 percent on Friday and 51 percent on Saturday. This is the first time Claude has topped the charts above ChatGPT and Gemini.

OpenAI released GPT-5.4 with native Computer Use this week. It scored 75 percent on the OSWorld-V desktop benchmark. The human average on the same test is 72.4 percent. The question for campuses is no longer whether a student used AI to write something. It is whether they used AI to do something. Those require different policy responses.

Anthropic published a peer-reviewed labor study this week using real Claude usage data. It found a 14 percent drop in hiring for workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations. No mass unemployment yet. The signal is at the entry door, not the exit. Career services offices need this data before the next recruiting cycle.