Subtitled : And now ladies and gentlemen…Artificial Intelligence!

Do you remember the days when cheating normally occurred with students trying to look at each others’ tests to copy?

Cheating by Calculator

When I was a junior in high school, I was terrible at most of the sciences, especially Chemistry. I still am! I had this timid, sweet, heavily bearded chemistry teacher who sat all students at lab tables of four. During every test, students were permitted to use their calculators. At my table sat a group of non-science-y girls, including myself and my good friend Heather. She was maybe one inch better at chemistry than I. Therefore, she would plug in answers onto her calculator and slyly scooch her calculator into my surface space, thereby allowing me to cheat off of her. I never got higher than a “C” in that class, but I suppose it could have been worse. Funnily, our teacher seemed to know and see what we were doing, and I think he thought it was sort of humorous.

Chemistry Teacher: Excuse me…. table of girls, are you almost finished with your tests?

Us: Oh yes Mr. Science teacher, we are. We love Chemistry.

Cheating by Cheat Sheet

Let’s now skip ahead to my first year of teaching at a middle school in Miami Beach. I had the Jewish students because of my last name, right? Anyhow, all of my students formed a close-knit tribe who put much pressure on each other to be the smartest and/or best students of the school. However, some of the tribe were not the smartest or the brightest, and all the kids knew who fell into which category.

One day, I was giving a vocabulary test when I saw a girl with all of the answers hid underneath her test paper. I thought I was so justified when I stomped over there, grabbed this cheat sheet, and ripped it up in front of the whole class. Poor Vicki turned red, of course, and I made a big deal about how terrible cheating is. Look at me–the hypocrite Chemistry cheater!

The next day, I was called into a meeting with Vicki’s mother who proceeded to tell me how much I hated her child and that I was ruining her life, etc. I was appalled that this woman would make excuses for her daughter’s misdeed and turn it around onto me. However, my overreaction and subsequent rant humiliated her child in front of her friends. Looking back, I can’t blame her mom for her reaction.

Now, I carefully choose my battles. We all have to. Many students cheat profusely and don’t even realize they are cheating. I think that students currently feel that if they make the effort to even complete an assignment, no matter how it gets done, that they deserve a good grade.

Cheating by Plagiarism

When Turnitin.com first entered into our high school resources, I was able to detect strings of words which were directly cut and pasted from sources on the internet. But this was certainly not foolproof. I recall one time a student wrote a paper about Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. In her essay, the phrase “Chinese mother and American daughter,” appeared several times. Of course, Turnitin.com spit back to me that this child had plagiarized five million percent. Clearly, it was due to these phrases which really could not be avoided in the student’s essay. The main trouble with the essay was redundancy. So, as a tool, Turnitin was and is limited.

Does Cheating Matter Anymore?

And now we live in a completely different world because of ChatGBT and AI. How do we combat this phenome? Is it a lost cause? I did some research to see how other teachers are dealing with it, and many of them said that they give long talks to their students about ethics and academic integrity. I don’t want to be a constant cynic or a Debbie Downer, but there are only certain and few students who would become champions for academic integrity. In our current culture, integrity is almost non-existent, and the power structure is laced with deceit in the highest order and degree. How are we supposed to tell students to ignore all of that and for them alone to just be honest? They have few to no models of these virtues, and the president of their own country cheats daily and hourly.

The only possible solution is to change the type of assignments and activities we give in our classes. We must give students purposeful and also INTERESTING work in order for them to feel invested, and for them to WANT to do well without help from AI . “Easier said than done, for sure, but designing assignments for which students can make choices, use their interests, express themselves, and play to their strengths might drive fewer students to cheat, ” states Christine Elgersma is Senior Editor, Learning Content, Strategy. Also, having the majority of assignments done in the classroom and without devices is almost a sure bet. Homework assignments can become more about studying , creating, or collaborating. I have created some of these types of assignments and posted them at my store at Teachers Pay Teachers, linked here: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/store/literary-ladder-lessons

Our challenges multiply daily, and we must be realistic. They say, if you can’t beat em, join em. My kind and “blind” Chemistry teacher decided to laugh along with us and choose larger battles. We all need to figure out which battles are worth fighting.