Cheating fears over AI were overblown, research suggests

Cites negligible changes in US despite chatbots

Last December, as high school and college students began trying out a new artificial intelligence chatbot called ChatGPT to manufacture writing assignments, fears of mass cheating spread across the United States.

To hinder bot-enabled plagiarism, some large public schools districts — including those in Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York City — quickly blocked ChatGPT on school-issued laptops and school Wi-Fi.

But the alarm may have been overblown — at least in high schools.

According to new research from Stanford University, the popularization of AI chatbots has not boosted overall cheating rates in schools. In surveys this year of more than 40 US high schools, some 60 percent to 70 percent of students said they had recently engaged in cheating — about the same percent as in previous years, Stanford education researchers said.

“There was a panic that these AI models will allow a whole new way of doing something that could be construed as cheating,” said Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Education who has surveyed high school students for more than a decade through an education nonprofit she cofounded. But “we’re just not seeing the change in the data.”

ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI in San Francisco, began to capture the public imagination late last year with its ability to fabricate human-sounding essays and emails. Almost immediately, classroom technology boosters started promising that AI tools like ChatGPT would revolutionize education. And critics began warning that such tools — which liberally make stuff up — would enable widespread cheating, and amplify misinformation, in schools.

Now the Stanford research, along with a recent report from the Pew Research Center, is challenging the notion that AI chatbots are upending public schools.

Many teens know little about ChatGPT, Pew found. And most say they have never used it for schoolwork.

Those trends could change, of course, as more high school students become familiar with AI tools.

This fall, Pew Research Center surveyed more than 1,400 US teenagers, ages 13 to 17, about their knowledge, use, and views of ChatGPT. The results may seem counterintuitive, given the plethora of panicked headlines last spring.

Nearly one-third of teens said they had heard “nothing at all” about the chatbot, according to the Pew survey, conducted from Sept. 26 to Oct. 23, 2023. Another 44 percent said they had heard “a little” about it.

Only 23 percent said they had heard a lot about ChatGPT. (The Pew survey did not ask the teens about other AI chatbots such as Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s GPT-4).

Responses varied by race and household income. About 72 percent of white teens said they had heard about the chatbot compared with about 56 percent of Black teens, Pew said.

About 75 percent of teens in households with annual incomes of $75,000 or more said they had heard about ChatGPT, Pew found, compared to just 41 percent of teens in households with annual incomes of less than $30,000.

Pew also asked teens whether they had ever used ChatGPT to help with their schoolwork. Only a small minority — 13 percent — said they had.

The Pew survey results suggest that ChatGPT, at least for now, has not become the disruptive phenomenon in schools that proponents and critics forecast. Among the subset of teens who said they had heard about the chatbot, the vast majority — 81 percent — said they had not used it to help with their schoolwork.

Cheating has long been rampant in schools. In surveys of more than 70,000 high school students between 2002 and 2015, 64 percent said they had cheated on a test. And 58 percent said they had plagiarized.

Since the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022, the overall frequency of high school students reporting they recently engaged in cheating has not increased, according to the Stanford researchers. The new research does not shed light on how frequently college students may employ chatbots as cheating bots. The Stanford and Pew researchers did not survey college students about their use of AI tools.

This year, the Stanford researchers added survey questions that specifically asked high school students about their use of AI chatbots. This fall, 12 percent to 28 percent of students at four East Coast and West Coast high schools said they had used an AI tool or digital device — such as ChatGPT or a smartphone — within the last month as an unauthorized aid during a school test, assignment or homework.

The findings could help shift discussions about chatbots in schools to focus less on cheating fears and more on helping students learn to understand, use, and think critically about new AI tools, the researchers said.