Clearly, in-person examinations are outdated and shallow, and coursework, take home exams and term papers allow for holistic evaluation of students, which is superior
Someone (talking about DEI) claimed to pass university you need to put in the effort. So much for that, if you can't fail students
Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast
"Chungin “Roy” Lee stepped onto Columbia University’s campus this past fall and, by his own admission, proceeded to use generative artificial intelligence to cheat on nearly every assignment...
(His personal essay, which turned his winding road to higher education into a parable for his ambition to build companies, was written with help from ChatGPT.) When he started at Columbia as a sophomore this past September, he didn’t worry much about academics or his GPA. “Most assignments in college are not relevant,” he told me. “They’re hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them.” While other new students fretted over the university’s rigorous core curriculum, described by the school as “intellectually expansive” and “personally transformative,” Lee used AI to breeze through with minimal effort. When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”...
What if they built a program that hid AI from browsers during remote job interviews so that interviewees could cheat their way through instead?
In February, Lee and Shanmugam launched a tool that did just that. Interview Coder’s website featured a banner that read F*CK LEETCODE. Lee posted a video of himself on YouTube using it to cheat his way through an internship interview with Amazon...
Although Columbia’s policy on AI is similar to that of many other universities’ — students are prohibited from using it unless their professor explicitly permits them to do so, either on a class-by-class or case-by-case basis — Lee said he doesn’t know a single student at the school who isn’t using AI to cheat. To be clear, Lee doesn’t think this is a bad thing. “I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating,” he said.
In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments... “College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,” a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT...
Teachers have tried AI-proofing assignments, returning to Blue Books or switching to oral exams. Brian Patrick Green, a tech-ethics scholar at Santa Clara University, immediately stopped assigning essays after he tried ChatGPT for the first time. Less than three months later, teaching a course called Ethics and Artificial Intelligence, he figured a low-stakes reading reflection would be safe — surely no one would dare use ChatGPT to write something personal. But one of his students turned in a reflection with robotic language and awkward phrasing that Green knew was AI-generated. A philosophy professor across the country at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock caught students in her Ethics and Technology class using AI to respond to the prompt “Briefly introduce yourself and say what you’re hoping to get out of this class.”
It isn’t as if cheating is new. But now, as one student put it, “the ceiling has been blown off.” Who could resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences? After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.” That future may arrive sooner than expected when you consider what a short window college really is. Already, roughly half of all undergrads have never experienced college without easy access to generative AI. “We’re talking about an entire generation of learning perhaps significantly undermined here,” said Green, the Santa Clara tech ethicist. “It’s short-circuiting the learning process, and it’s happening fast.”
Before OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, cheating had already reached a sort of zenith. At the time, many college students had finished high school remotely, largely unsupervised, and with access to tools like Chegg and Course Hero. These companies advertised themselves as vast online libraries of textbooks and course materials but, in reality, were cheating multi-tools. For $15.95 a month, Chegg promised answers to homework questions in as little as 30 minutes, 24/7, from the 150,000 experts with advanced degrees it employed, mostly in India. When ChatGPT launched, students were primed for a tool that was faster, more capable...
These days, professors will often state their policy on their syllabi — allowing AI, for example, as long as students cite it as if it were any other source, or permitting it for conceptual help only, or requiring students to provide receipts of their dialogue with a chatbot. Students often interpret those instructions as guidelines rather than hard rules. Sometimes they will cheat on their homework without even knowing — or knowing exactly how much — they are violating university policy when they ask a chatbot to clean up a draft or find a relevant study to cite. Wendy, a freshman finance major at one of the city’s top universities, told me that she is against using AI. Or, she clarified, “I’m against copy-and-pasting. I’m against cheating and plagiarism. All of that. It’s against the student handbook.” Then she described, step-by-step, how on a recent Friday at 8 a.m., she called up an AI platform to help her write a four-to-five-page essay due two hours later...
“I really like writing,” she said, sounding strangely nostalgic for her high-school English class — the last time she wrote an essay unassisted. “Honestly,” she continued, “I think there is beauty in trying to plan your essay. You learn a lot. You have to think, Oh, what can I write in this paragraph? Or What should my thesis be? ” But she’d rather get good grades. “An essay with ChatGPT, it’s like it just gives you straight up what you have to follow. You just don’t really have to think that much.”
I asked Wendy if I could read the paper she turned in, and when I opened the document, I was surprised to see the topic: critical pedagogy, the philosophy of education pioneered by Paulo Freire. The philosophy examines the influence of social and political forces on learning and classroom dynamics. Her opening line: “To what extent is schooling hindering students’ cognitive ability to think critically?” Later, I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy but one that argues learning is what “makes us truly human.” She wasn’t sure what to make of the question. “I use AI a lot. Like, every day,” she said. “And I do believe it could take away that critical-thinking part. But it’s just — now that we rely on it, we can’t really imagine living without it.”
Most of the writing professors I spoke to told me that it’s abundantly clear when their students use AI. Sometimes there’s a smoothness to the language, a flattened syntax; other times, it’s clumsy and mechanical. The arguments are too evenhanded — counterpoints tend to be presented just as rigorously as the paper’s central thesis. Words like multifaceted and context pop up more than they might normally. On occasion, the evidence is more obvious, as when last year a teacher reported reading a paper that opened with “As an AI, I have been programmed …” Usually, though, the evidence is more subtle, which makes nailing an AI plagiarist harder than identifying the deed. Some professors have resorted to deploying so-called Trojan horses, sticking strange phrases, in small white text, in between the paragraphs of an essay prompt. (The idea is that this would theoretically prompt ChatGPT to insert a non sequitur into the essay.) Students at Santa Clara recently found the word broccoli hidden in a professor’s assignment. Last fall, a professor at the University of Oklahoma sneaked the phrases “mention Finland” and “mention Dua Lipa” in his. A student discovered his trap and warned her classmates about it on TikTok. “It does work sometimes,” said Jollimore, the Cal State Chico professor. “I’ve used ‘How would Aristotle answer this?’ when we hadn’t read Aristotle. But I’ve also used absurd ones and they didn’t notice that there was this crazy thing in their paper, meaning these are people who not only didn’t write the paper but also didn’t read their own paper before submitting it.”
Still, while professors may think they are good at detecting AI-generated writing, studies have found they’re actually not. One, published in June 2024, used fake student profiles to slip 100 percent AI-generated work into professors’ grading piles at a U.K. university. The professors failed to flag 97 percent. It doesn’t help that since ChatGPT’s launch, AI’s capacity to write human-sounding essays has only gotten better...
There are, of course, plenty of simple ways to fool both professors and detectors...
Most professors have come to the conclusion that stopping rampant AI abuse would require more than simply policing individual cases and would likely mean overhauling the education system to consider students more holistically. “Cheating correlates with mental health, well-being, sleep exhaustion, anxiety, depression, belonging,” said Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford and one of the world’s leading student-engagement researchers.
Many teachers now seem to be in a state of despair. In the fall, Sam Williams was a teaching assistant for a writing-intensive class on music and social change at the University of Iowa that, officially, didn’t allow students to use AI at all. Williams enjoyed reading and grading the class’s first assignment: a personal essay that asked the students to write about their own music tastes. Then, on the second assignment, an essay on the New Orleans jazz era (1890 to 1920), many of his students’ writing styles changed drastically. Worse were the ridiculous factual errors. Multiple essays contained entire paragraphs on Elvis Presley (born in 1935). “I literally told my class, ‘Hey, don’t use AI. But if you’re going to cheat, you have to cheat in a way that’s intelligent. You can’t just copy exactly what it spits out,’” Williams said.
Williams knew most of the students in this general-education class were not destined to be writers, but he thought the work of getting from a blank page to a few semi-coherent pages was, above all else, a lesson in effort. In that sense, most of his students utterly failed. “They’re using AI because it’s a simple solution and it’s an easy way for them not to put in time writing essays. And I get it, because I hated writing essays when I was in school,” Williams said. “But now, whenever they encounter a little bit of difficulty, instead of fighting their way through that and growing from it, they retreat to something that makes it a lot easier for them.”
By November, Williams estimated that at least half of his students were using AI to write their papers. Attempts at accountability were pointless. Williams had no faith in AI detectors, and the professor teaching the class instructed him not to fail individual papers, even the clearly AI-smoothed ones...
The confusion was enough to sour Williams on education as a whole. By the end of the semester, he was so disillusioned that he decided to drop out of graduate school altogether. “We’re in a new generation, a new time, and I just don’t think that’s what I want to do,” he said.
Jollimore, who has been teaching writing for more than two decades, is now convinced that the humanities, and writing in particular, are quickly becoming an anachronistic art elective like basket-weaving...
He worries about the long-term consequences of passively allowing 18-year-olds to decide whether to actively engage with their assignments. Would it accelerate the widening soft-skills gap in the workplace? If students rely on AI for their education, what skills would they even bring to the workplace? Lakshya Jain, a computer-science lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, has been using those questions in an attempt to reason with his students. “If you’re handing in AI work,” he tells them, “you’re not actually anything different than a human assistant to an artificial-intelligence engine, and that makes you very easily replaceable. Why would anyone keep you around?” That’s not theoretical: The COO of a tech research firm recently asked Jain why he needed programmers any longer.
The ideal of college as a place of intellectual growth, where students engage with deep, profound ideas, was gone long before ChatGPT...
It’s not just the students: Multiple AI platforms now offer tools to leave AI-generated feedback on students’ essays. Which raises the possibility that AIs are now evaluating AI-generated papers, reducing the entire academic exercise to a conversation between two robots — or maybe even just one.
It’ll be years before we can fully account for what all of this is doing to students’ brains. Some early research shows that when students off-load cognitive duties onto chatbots, their capacity for memory, problem-solving, and creativity could suffer. Multiple studies published within the past year have linked AI usage with a deterioration in critical-thinking skills; one found the effect to be more pronounced in younger participants. In February, Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University published a study that found a person’s confidence in generative AI correlates with reduced critical-thinking effort. The net effect seems, if not quite Wall-E, at least a dramatic reorganization of a person’s efforts and abilities, away from high-effort inquiry and fact-gathering and toward integration and verification. This is all especially unnerving if you add in the reality that AI is imperfect — it might rely on something that is factually inaccurate or just make something up entirely — with the ruinous effect social media has had on Gen Z’s ability to tell fact from fiction...
“Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought,” wrote Duke professor Orin Starn in a recent column titled “My Losing Battle Against AI Cheating,” citing a quote often attributed to W. H. Auden. But it’s not just writing that develops critical thinking. “Learning math is working on your ability to systematically go through a process to solve a problem. Even if you’re not going to use algebra or trigonometry or calculus in your career, you’re going to use those skills to keep track of what’s up and what’s down when things don’t make sense,” said Michael Johnson, an associate provost at Texas A&M University. Adolescents benefit from structured adversity, whether it’s algebra or chores. They build self-esteem and work ethic. It’s why the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued for the importance of children learning to do hard things, something that technology is making infinitely easier to avoid"
