Teachers and professors can make adjustments to their teaching that will greatly reduce incidents of student cheating with ai. It turns out those changes aren't much different from what worked to deter previous cheating methods.
That's the argument of Tricia Bertram Gallant, a longtime academic integrity expert and director of the Office of Academic Integrity at the University of California, San Diego. In his opinion, when it comes to student cheating in the age of ai, “everything has changed and nothing has changed.”
Gallant is co-author of the upcoming book, “<a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/Opposite-Cheating-Teaching-Integrity-Engaging/dp/0806194952″ target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of ai,” with David Rettinger, associate professor of psychology at the University of Tulsa.
“Many teachers think that only bad students cheat, and they believe that students cheat intentionally or brutally,” he says. But she says it's important to remember that students are human and that some humans have always cheated in certain situations, especially young people who are still discovering their ethics and values.
Remembering that most students are not looking to cheat can “lower the temperature” so that instructors don't “get so mad about it.”
Gallant acknowledges, however, that in the past two years new artificial intelligence tools have increased the prevalence of student fraud, which has been especially challenging for college professors. “ChatGPT is just ubiquitous,” he says. “Access is free. He is much faster than any of his classmates. And it feels safer. It feels anonymous, right? “I feel like I’m not going to let anyone know I’m doing this.” This is causing frustration for many instructors.
But the solutions this expert recommends have not changed. “It's about teaching for integrity, and there are certain things you can do that work whether ai is present or not.”
For Gallant and many other experts on student cheating, the best strategy is to focus on how assignments and tests are designed, rather than turning to tools to try to detect high-tech cheating.
For this week's EdSurge podcast, we connected with Gallant to hear his advice on how teachers and professors can respond to ai. One key, he says, is for educators to understand the most common reasons why students cheat in the first place.
Listen to the episode on Spotify, <a target="_blank" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-ai-has-changed-student-cheating-and-how-to-respond/id972239500?i=1000683061969″ target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>Apple Podcasts or in the player below.
