Cheating cheaters cheating

Someone asked me recently if I thought my former students would have used ChatGPT to cheat. I had a two-word answer.

“Hell. Yes.”

I don’t believe most of my former university students would have used ChatGPT to write essays I assigned, but I always had 15% to 20% of students who were dedicated and tireless cheaters. As cheaters, they gave no quarter. They never stopped cheating. They were Jake LaMottas of cheating, Raging Bulls of cheating.

ChatGPT is new software that allows users to enter a prompt and have a unique, well-written essay in response … with citations. For the cheaters out there, in school and elsewhere, this is beautiful thing.

I understood why some of my students cheated. Many were from lower middle-class or poor families. They wanted the tangible results of a college education, for themselves and their loved ones. They wanted that degree that would bring a good job, a nice house, a gleaming car, two weeks of vacation each year in Cancun.

They cared not at all that a liberal arts education would help them handle life and work better and appreciate life and its beauties more. That might have been my ideal for my students, but for that 15% to 20%, their plan was to get done, get out and start making that dough, no matter what ethical violations they had to commit to get there.

Many times my students – particularly my cheating-prone students – whined that I required too much essay-writing and too much book-reading, and that I had too many pop quizzes on those readings. Sometimes they would rise up as one and tell me the class had decided it didn’t want to write so many essays, read so many pages or do a written final.

My smiling response was always the same: “This class is not a democracy. It’s a dictatorship, albeit a benevolent dictatorship. You will do what I tell you to do, but I will tell you what to do with this smile on my face.”

So some students cheated. They would do entire papers without citations. They would cut and paste large portions of articles they found online into their own essays and do so without citations. Some would cut and paste entire articles and just replace the names of the authors with their own at the top of the essay.

I was notorious on our campus for catching cheaters. I would know, from the quality of the writing and/or research, that this C- student had not suddenly written a paper worthy of publication in a juried academic journal or in The Atlantic Magazine.

Most plagiarists’ first instinct is denial, and that’s what I generally received from my cheaters when I said, “I know your writing, and I know you didn’t write this.” I would next present the evidence of where I’d found the plagiarized article online. Then the responses varied, from, “That’s a coincidence,” to “Everyone cheats, Mr. Kofford. You are so naïve,” to, “I’m sorry.”

For the ones who I believed were sincerely regretful, I would hand the paper back and say, “Let’s pretend I haven’t seen this yet. Turn it in again and do it right. I’ll mark it down a grade or two, but I’ll accept a repaired version.”

For the students who showed no remorse, or stuck to their lies about cheating, I sent their cases off to Students Services for academic disciplinary action.

ChatGPT will make cheating easier for students to do and harder for teachers to detect. One answer to this conundrum is more in-class essays, done in those much-dreaded bluebooks, although that won’t work with increasingly popular online classes. Another thing that might work is professors coming up wither creative prompts that will throw ChatGPT for a loop.

Teachers, though, are going to have to be creative and vigilant with this tool at students’ disposal.

That’s because cheaters are going to cheat.