One spring afternoon, a professor in a Massachusetts classroom discovered that twelve of her students had turned in work that wasn’t theirs. It was created by a machine, not lifted from a journal or copied from a classmate. Twelve were caught in a single class during a semester. How many she missed is unknown to her. People should be more troubled by that number than they are.
After joining the academic honesty board at her university, Rebecca Hamlin, a political science and legal studies professor at the University of Massachusetts—Amherst, became aware of the pattern almost immediately. She claims to be able to tell. Something put together by a language model stands out when you spend your days reading incisive, contentious, and genuinely difficult prose. It’s not always because of what it says, but rather because of the unique ease with which it says nothing. “It’s really risky,” she said, “because it’s way more obvious to someone who reads really good writing all day long.”
The precise extent to which this has spread is more difficult to determine. According to Ohio State professor Eric Anderman, who has spent years researching academic integrity, the majority of educators are undervaluing the issue. Pupils don’t acknowledge it. It’s highly likely that the numbers that do appear are lower than actual numbers. There is an odd social compact in place whereby universities make policy declarations, professors act as though they can catch it, and students act as though they are not engaging in it, all the while the real behavior continues unabated.
According to the American Bar Association, ChatGPT passed the Uniform Bar Exam by a sizable margin. It has done well on business case studies, medical evaluations, and physics tests. ChatGPT “is the future of cheating.” This is not a warning, according to David Pritchard, an emeritus professor of physics at MIT who has spent years researching how students behave in online courses. It reads more like a comment from someone who has already witnessed it.
What is lost in this discussion is what students are truly losing, which is more subdued and difficult to measure. Russell Monroe, Liberty University’s director of academic integrity, discusses dignity. the feeling that you’ve earned something. that something genuine that occurred inside of you is represented by the grade on the page. “You can look at your degree with pride,” he states, “knowing this is something I achieved on my own merit.” That might seem like a dated notion. It could also be exactly correct.
This is also a financial reality. If you fail a course due to academic dishonesty, you will have to retake it, which will cost you more money in tuition and possibly more loans. Financial aid was put at risk. a transcript with a note outlining the reasons for a student’s dismissal. Doors that shut without a knock. Students who were most inclined to take short cuts in the first place typically bear the brunt of the consequences.
Years later, a few of them begin working. They covertly outsourced jobs requiring critical thinking, writing, and reasoning. At that point, nobody checks. Turnitin is not being used by anyone. However, something is lacking, and it turns out that matters—sometimes in embarrassing ways, sometimes in truly dangerous ways.
For more than fifteen years, Denise Pope and Victor Lee, researchers at Stanford, have been monitoring the prevalence of cheating. According to their anonymous surveys, between 60 and 70 percent of students admitted to cheating at least once in a given month. This figure predates ChatGPT by a significant margin. AI hasn’t significantly increased those rates, according to their more recent data. There was already cheating. The tools are now different.
