Research Wednesday | June 11, 2025
An Unusual Take on Cheating with AI
Two interesting articles from May 2025 were published on cheating with AI. The first was a typical “the sky is falling" narrative that everybody is cheating and that professors can’t do anything about it, or administrators are too cowardly to punish students who get caught. Said one teacher at Columbia who caught a student blatantly copying and pasting text from Chat GPT, “The administration said I could give the student a D-minus, but I couldn’t flunk him because parents might complain.” The article contends that most professors have given up the fight, don’t believe that the programs to catch AI text in student papers, and are counting the days to retirement (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/openai-chatgpt-ai-cheating-education-college-students-school.html). More than 64% of college students admit to cheating and plagiarism, and that is probably a low estimate. Some professors are returning to in-class hand-written exams, while others require 15-minute meetings with students and require students to explain and defend their work. The tragedy is that if professors do not catch these cheaters, their future employers will recognize their lack of meaningful skills. One of the Columbia cheaters raised $3 million in venture capital funding for developing a program that would feed students answers to online job interview questions and conceal the presence of AI on their computers. They will be hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and be unemployable.
But a case in Boston at Northeastern University paints a less sympathetic picture of the professors. Students caught a professor in the business school who prohibited students from using AI. Still, students caught the professor using AI, rather clumsily, for lectures, PowerPoints, and syllabus development. The students noticed that the materials developed by the professor were full of misspellings, relied on ancient research, and had irrelevant examples and pictures. (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/technology/chatgpt-college-professors.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/technology/chatgpt-college-professors.html). The students are asking for a refund for the course, arguing that they are paying more than $50,000 a year to be taught by humans. If they wanted to be taught by an algorithm, they could have done that at home for free. The professors argued that they are overworked, which is especially true of the growing number of adjunct professors with large class loads, and the adjunct job may be their second or third job. One solution is to stop AI-generated lectures and PowerPoint slides and have classrooms be what they should be – places of lively discussion so that professors will quickly know who did the work and who did not. Most of the professors interviewed for the article said that their colleges had no training for how to use AI effectively and ethically, and their schools had no policy guidance for students and professors.
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