Learning is hard, and cheating is easier than ever: What can teachers do?

Students have been trying to get by without working very hard since schools were invented, writes Daniel Buck, assistant principal of a charter school, in Education Next. A recent survey found 95 percent of K-12 students admitted to cheating in some way in the previous year.  

A Stanford survey in spring of 2023 found no increase in cheating from the pre- to post-ChatbotGPT eras, he writes. But AI tools were very, very new then. Students have been learning quickly how to get bots to do their research and writing. And the bots keep getting better at it.

Buck doesn't believe schools can prevent cheating by reducing stress, eliminating high-stakes exams or trying to ease competition. Turning every student into an eager learner who doesn't want to cheat is not realistic.

Instead, schools and teachers must make it more difficult to cheat. That means rethinking homework, returning to handwritten tests, emphasizing end-of-course exams, and banning phones, tablets, and laptops during assessment or work time. And schools must implement and administer consequences when students are caught.

"Effective learning is inherently effortful," Buck writes. Mastering "academic content requires focus, attention, and study."

Students cheat because schoolwork is hard, writes Ethan Mollick. "Learning is not always fun and forms of extrinsic motivation, like grades, are often required to get people to learn." Most people "don't like mental effort," so they turn to AI.

Students are much less willing to struggle with a challenging idea these days, Sarah Martin, a high school English teacher, told New York Times writer Jessica Grose. "There's just no grit." So they use AI to do the heavy mental lifting.

Leila Wheless, a North Carolina teacher, told her eighth-graders to research prophets to support their reading of a graphic novel, Persepolis, in which the main character fantasizes about being a prophet. Not-so-intelligent AI prompted one student to write that “the Christian prophet Moses got chocolate stains out of T-shirts." Wheless thought this might be a bot's interpretation of Moses getting water out of a rock. Her students, she told Grose, "do not have the background knowledge or indeed the intellectual stamina to question unlikely responses."

AI cheating threatens "the value of a college diploma as a signal to employers that you are diligent, smart and ready for white-collar employment," writes Megan McArdle in the Washington Post. And "the less economic value a diploma provides, the less willing parents and taxpayers will be willing to spend helping students get one."