Students used to hide cheat sheets in their sleeves. Now they can hide an entire artificial intelligence system in their phones.

Last night I was giving a midterm at the private language school where I currently teach. I noticed something about a young man who had been mentally quite “absent” during nearly every class discussion and activity because he spent most of the time staring at his phone.

He got a very good grade on the midterm.

Normally I love when students succeed, but in this case something did not make sense. He had never known the answers during class, and he practically hid from me during activities so that I would not call on him.

I am going to assume that he cheated. However, I don’t really know how. The test was given on Google Forms, so he would have had to navigate quickly between ChatGPT and the test, all on the tiny screen of his phone. For me, I would probably be blind by now if I tried to do all that on a phone — but that’s another story.

What used to require a folded cheat sheet can now be done instantly with artificial intelligence.

At this point in my post-retirement, part-time teaching and tutoring career, I simply do not feel it is worth it to “call out” students for what may or may not be cheating. I usually give little speeches with phrases like:

“You’re the one who is not learning and not getting your money’s worth if you cheat in this class. I still get my paycheck, and I will still teach you as best I can.”

Back in the old days, when I first started teaching, I handled things very differently.

I once caught a girl named Vicki using a cheat sheet during a vocabulary test. I stomped over to her desk and ripped it up right there in front of the whole class.

To this day I am astonished at what an asshole I was.

That poor girl brought her mother to school, and they both cried about how I had humiliated her and how she couldn’t understand why I hated her so much.

I’m sure Vicki, even now many years later, probably still hates my guts. And it may have soured her on English classes for a long time.

How was that terrible ordeal worth it?

It wasn’t.

That experience is one reason I no longer publicly accuse students of cheating. It is almost always a lose-lose situation, unless a teacher discovers that a student is running some kind of organized cheating operation. Then perhaps intervention is necessary.

My opinion now is simple:

• do not allow smartphones in the classroom
• do not give tests on computers

The days of writing on paper need to return.

There are several reasons students should write on actual paper:

• There will be far less cheating.
It is simply harder and much more obvious.

• Students will learn much more.
Writing by hand solidifies learning in a way that typing on a screen often does not.

• Students will have physical evidence of their work and their progress.
Instead of everything disappearing into “the cloud,” they can actually see what they have done and how they have improved.

Education in the United States — and probably in many other countries as well — is currently experiencing several downward trends.

If we want to begin correcting course, one simple step would help enormously:

No phones in classrooms.

Rip the band-aid off.

It would at least be a start.

Many of the themes in this essay appear in my upcoming teaching memoir, Red Pens, Blue Screens: A Teacher’s Life Through Politics, Technology & Cultural Upheaval.