New tech, same old student cheating
As students across the country settle into a new semester, their professors are trying to figure out what to do about ChatGPT — the free artificial intelligence writing tool capable of producing surprisingly realistic prose in response to just about any prompt you can come up with. Already, the tool has been used to compose publishable stories for tech websites, ad copy for wireless commercials, and even a pretty good Jerry Seinfeld-style joke about airplanes.
My colleagues in academia are worried about something else: Can it write college essays?
If computers can write papers that are essentially indistinguishable from ones produced by students, how should we respond? Should we create new assignments? Develop new strategies to discourage cheating or have students handwrite their essays in class? Or do we abandon such assignments altogether?
I’ve taught writing at the university level for nearly two decades now, and I have a simple answer: We should do nothing at all. Or at least nothing we haven’t been doing already.
Just recently, I was teaching a composition class and, at the end of the term, when I collected final papers, one stood out: an insightful, carefully crafted defense of physician-assisted suicide. The essay was surprising, however, not for its quality but for its author: a well-heeled lacrosse player who had previously distinguished himself mainly by his disengagement. He wasn’t a bad student, but he wasn’t a good one. He earned generous Cs on earlier work and only spoke up when he could share stories about his tony vacations.
Though the paper he wrote wasn’t obviously plagiarized, it was wildly better than anything else he’d produced that semester, so I confronted him about it. After he was unable to answer some basic questions about the argument he had supposedly developed himself, he broke down and confessed.
This young man didn’t use ChatGPT to write his essay. He cheated the oldfashioned way — by buying his paper online. The takeaway? Students have never needed AI to turn in essays they didn’t write — at least not the ones with the financial means to pay for them.
ChatGPT doesn’t present professors with a problem we haven’t seen before. Don McCabe, a Rutgers University professor sometimes referred to as the founding father of academic integrity research, conducted a 13-year survey from 2002 through 2015 which found that 62% of undergraduates admitted to having
New or harsher penalties, tougher assignments or better anti-plagiarism software won’t solve the problem. In fact, such tactics would likely make it worse.
cheated on a written assignment at least once. The reality is that plagiarism has long been a fact of life at American universities. ChatGPT just gives students a new tool to accomplish this very old task.
Administering new or harsher penalties, tougher assignments or better antiplagiarism software won’t solve the problem. In fact, such tactics would likely make it worse. A 2001 study found that extrinsic motivators like these don’t discourage cheating — they actually encourage it. By drawing students’ attention away from the real significance of coursework, these strategies can turn assignments into a game of how to outsmart the system rather than vehicles for learning the actual material. Moreover, they turn education into a cat-andmouse game that’s as tedious for professors as it is for the people they teach.
Rather than putting additional energy into sleuthing out whether students have used the latest technology to get around doing their assignments, professors can instead continue to invest their effort in creating assignments that truly engage their students. Nichols College psychology Professor Brian McCoy writes of the value of having students own their learning. “Students read and write with passion when they tackle topics that have personal meaning for them.”
In my ethics class, one of the most popular assignments asks students to live by one of the philosophies we study for a week and then write about the experience. It’s a simple but effective prompt that emphasizes the real-world applicability of course material while placing a high value on the student’s interpretation of it. And it works well every year.
As new technologies arrive that facilitate students taking the easy route, our job as professors will continue to be as it always has been: Arguing for the intrinsic value of the subjects we teach — in this case, writing. We need to keep making the case that our students should want to be good writers and that they’re selling themselves short if they pass the work off to a bot.
As I always tell my students, writing helps me think better. I often don’t know how I feel about a particular topic until I write it down, until I force myself to compose my thoughts and commit them to the page (or the screen). I tell them that writing is a way to make sense of our lives and experiences, to give order to the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. And I tell them that good writing can be a joyful experience — as it is for me at this very moment.
Will some of them cheat anyway? Of course. Will some of them try ChatGPT this spring? Indubitably. And I’ll keep trying to ferret them out. But I won’t change what I’m doing because I’m afraid of some computer.