Cheating has become the norm on college campuses, professors tell Beth McMurtrie, who reports for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Students use AI to cheat on information discussion boards, says Amy Clukey, an associate English professor at the University of Louisville. They cheat on essays.
A few weeks ago, she emailed a student to say that she knew the student had cheated on a minor assignment with AI and if she did it again, she would fail the course. Clukey also noted there were several missed assignments. The student replied to “sincerely apologize,” said she was “committed to getting back on track,” and that she regretted “any disruption [her] absence or incomplete work may have caused in the course.” But her next paper was essentially written by artificial intelligence. Curious, Clukey asked ChatGPT to write an email apologizing to a professor for plagiarism and missed work. . . “It spit out an email almost exactly like the one I had gotten.”
"Professors in writing-intensive courses, particularly those teaching introductory or general-education classes" say "AI abuse has become pervasive," writes McMurtrie. "Clukey said she feels less like a teacher and more like a human plagiarism detector, spending hours each week analyzing her students’ writing to determine its authenticity."
Professors worry that the culture has changed. Students don't feel guilty about cheating.
"Some institutions, including Middlebury College, in Vermont, and Stanford University, are reconsidering elements of their honor codes because they’re simply not working," writes McMurtrie. "At Middlebury, the percentage of students who admitted on an annual survey to violating the honor code rose from 35 percent in 2019 to 65 percent in 2024."
Many Middlebury students said that anything less than an A is seen as failure, a report said.
Exams aren't proctored and students believe that everyone else is cheating, wrote Hannah Sayre, a senior, last year in an opinion essay for The Middlebury Campus student newspaper. In an interview, Sayre blamed “the sense Middlebury doesn’t care if it’s allowing students to cheat or making it easy for them to.”
K-12 grade inflation sends unprepared students to college, where they demand inflated grades, writes Karin Klein, a Los Angeles Times columnist.
High school students are earning more credits in advanced courses (or courses with more impressive titles), say researchers. Math grades are up. But mastery of the material has declined, reports the National Center for Education Statistics.
Once in college, professors are under pressure to inflate grades "because of student evaluations, which are often more negative for tough graders," Klein writes. "Remember that about 70% of college instructors are adjunct professors who have few job protections." If grades and graduation rates go up, everyone looks good.
But the market value of a college degree is down, she writes. One in six employers "say they hesitate to hire recent college graduates because they tend to be underprepared and poor at communicating."
Based on past experiences with various Dilshad Garden Escort Service, I can say that the quality and professionalism are way above standard here.
AP English Literature & Composition exams -- if they maintain their standards, which have been slipping, under the College Board's "recalibration" -- solve these problems by having students write in person, rather than for homework, and by having the resulting essays externally graded, rather than internally marked by instructors.
What else would anyone expect from a country that just re-elected a narcissistic sociopath who has never read a book in his life to be president? Of course, we will probably all see the arguments that school choice will solve everything since private schools have the secret method of detecting cheating.