Inside the university AI cheating crisis
theguardian.com
Inside the university AI cheating crisis
1–10 of 113 posts
Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis
#2How do students that cheat with AI pass the exams?
Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis
#3We’ve built a solution in conjunction with a university to this problem that is pretty low effort to implement, but very few professors can be bothered to even try it out (the apathy and red tape is unreal). Honestly, it has been disheartening that distribution is so tough, as the results have been great for those who are using it.
Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis
#4TurnitIn's cheating detection tools have always been garbage - and I say that as an ex-academic who was 'forced' to use those tools extensively (the PDFs submitted by students are only visible in the Turnitin portal with the 'flags' to the right).
Even before the 'AI detection' tool (IMHO snake-oil) the features around copy-pasting/plagiarism were so bad I always ignored them. The tool would flag things like commonly used coverpage forms. That universities pay a fortune for those tools is an indictment of the industry.
Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis
#5How do students that cheat with AI pass the exams?
A lot of university courses don’t have exams. Rather, the students are graded based on projects, papers, or presentations.
I’ve been teaching at a university for more than 20 years, and only a few times have I given students a final exam. I used to assign final papers, but I stopped doing that in the spring of 2023, when ChatGPT was becoming widely known and I couldn’t decide how to deal with its use by students.
The big issue, in my opinion, is that AI can be used productively and ethically in education; it can be used to cheat; and there’s a huge gray area between those two extremes, where there doesn’t seem to be any consensus yet.
For example, suppose a student uses Claude to brainstorm topics, then chooses one from among those topics and researches it in depth, then does some more brainstorming with ChatGPT based on what he or she found, and then jots down what he or she wants to say as bullet points. Finally, Gemini is used to write a paper that presents the information in those bullet points in a logical and well-formed manner, and the student checks the paper and makes revisions before turning it in. Is that okay?
When I’ve discussed this issue with humanities faculty, they’ve generally regarded that kind of AI-assisted writing to be cheating. Science faculty, however, have been more receptive to it, as they care more about the accuracy and originality of the ideas than about how the words are strung together. My sample was small, though, and I am sure that there are different opinions on both sides.
I retired from my full-time university post in March 2023. Now that I’m teaching only one class a semester, I have each student do a final one-on-one presentation and interview with me, which makes up a large part of their grade. I’m able to do that because I’m teaching only that one class. If I had a full teaching load with a hundred students or more total, there’s no way I could interview each one individually.
Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis
#6How do students that cheat with AI pass the exams?
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Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis
#7We’ve built a solution in conjunction with a university to this problem that is pretty low effort to implement, but very few professors can be bothered to even try it out (the apathy and red tape is unreal). Honestly, it has been disheartening that distribution is so tough, as the results have been great for those who are using it.
Could you share the product and some details about it? I'm curious.
Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis
#8How do students that cheat with AI pass the exams?
A few universities scrapped exams during Covid and didn’t bring them back, focusing on coursework instead
Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis
#9I am enormously glad I went to college before these tools existed. I don't know how I would handle myself with access to them.
Re: Inside the university AI cheating crisis
#10How do students that cheat with AI pass the exams?
If you use AI exclusively I assume they won't. But I feel like most people who use it, use it to save some time - like they have the general idea of what they want to say, and just need a little help polishing it into a final form.
Like that joke about how you write a summary, use AI to expand it, then the recipient uses AI to get a summary. It's no longer a joke - it's really happening.
I've also seen students use AI to understand material - instead of reading the material, they feed it through AI to explain it to them. This is either a mediocre student who'll have a hard time if they ever need to do original research, or it's a bad teacher. Either way they'll do OK on the exams.