Don't let the AI conversation fool you

The real threat facing education systems is not AI or distracted students - it's educators.

Jan 22, 2023

For the past few weeks, my inbox has been inundated by ChatGPT and artificial intelligence taking over classrooms. Whether the New York Times citing professors struggling to identify and handle AI-generated assignments to the New York State City School District outright banning its use, the conversation is binary - either we get ahead of the technology or students won’t be learning as they should. For educators that pride themselves on the diversity of thought and intellectual progress, this trend stands in stark contrast and speaks to the misguided perspective these institutions habituate.

I’m reminded of a recent visit to my alma mater when I spoke with a previous professor (a great one at that) about how his classroom has changed since COVID and the transition online. Surprisingly the conversation revolved not around the learning environments themselves but rather the overwhelming percentage of his students who have been caught cheating - be it online Q&A sites, textbook answers, or from their peers. Cheating has always been a factor, he said, but now more than ever.

This is where the conversation around AI and learning environments meet: why are students compelled to cheat? And why are we observing more and more students turning to external resources to help? Focusing our attention on the mechanisms for assistance distracts from the root of the problem which is why students are growing disconnected from the material in classrooms.

Teachers everywhere have been looking for solutions to cheating, particularly in STEM disciplines, for decades. As a former software engineering student myself, I had to run all my code assignments through plagiarism checkers and code-duplication tools before the professor would even begin grading. The problem of cheating is not a new one but it’s one that we’ve failed to adequately address.

The paradox of cheating is that students don’t want to cheat. Every student I’ve spoken to would rather be proficient enough in the material to answer every question and problem set without assistance. Professors contest this with observations of students on their phones, heavy grading curves, and disinterest in reading or engaging with the material. As Bill Campbell wrote in New Paradigms for College Teaching:

Faculty lounges are thick with complaints about today’s students: they don’t read, they can’t think, they’re only interested in getting ready for a job. I am convinced that the root of most of these complaints is that our students are different from us. They have not fallen in love with an academic discipline the way we did when we were in school and we hold them responsible for it. “When I was their age,” we say, “I took my professors seriously, I listened to their every word. Why just this morning a student said my lecture was bogus, do you believe it? These students today, they just dont want to learn, how soon can I retire?”

Blaming the bull for bucking at a rodeo misses the point. That bull would rather be grazing in a field than being ridden by some disinterested cowboy telling it to “calm down.” In the same way, lecturing students create environments that foster disconnection and cheating. Professors cannot teach assuming it doesn’t matter whether their students care or not - there is not an inexhaustible supply of students nor a time-effective alternative for students to learn material for each course. Caught between a rock and a hard place, students will do what they need to for the grade.

So while ChatGPT and other cheating mechanisms compound the challenges already facing education systems, we cannot be distracted by that danger. Instead, we must critically ask ourselves why students need to cheat in the first place. Only when we as educators come to terms with how we fail students will we come out ahead of whatever tech is next.

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P.S. The image used for this piece was generated by AI…don’t tell my 4th grade art teacher

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