Comment by hatthew
6 hours ago
Every few weeks I see a headline about a teacher catching 80%+ of their students cheating with AI. I wonder how much newsworthiness selection bias is taking place here? Out of all teachers that do this type of experiment, do 90% of them them find that most students cheat, or do we just hear about the 1% that have the biggest numbers?
Professor here. Every single one of us that looks for it, finds plenty of examples of students “cheating”. Learning takes effort, and humans (some more than others) are designed to minimize effort.
We have designed education around exams and evaluation. If I design an exercise that does not contribute to their final grade, students don’t even look at it. If I design a 30min tutorial on a programming subject, students will not look at it and will spend 8 hours on the (graded) assignment that was designed for 1 hour on top of the 30 minute tutorial.
I am making some changes: evaluation will be as randomly as possible to minimize overfitting to our exercises. Draw from real world if possible.
I would also like to get rid of bologna’s modular structure and go to the UK’s one-exam-at-the-end-of-the-degree model.
But overall, we need more passionate students. Those don’t care about all this cheating and would appreciate that professors and future employers see their effort and success.
I think my primary curiosity is: does "rampant AI cheating" mean "most students in most classes" or "a few students in a lot of classes"? The latter is my expectation based on my perception of pre-AI cheating, so I'm wondering if AI has made it 1.5x worse or 10x worse?
AI has made it 10x worse.
My wife is a professor. Tons of students cheat. Often badly. It is a complete phase shift from pre-chatgpt. Detection methods keep having to adapt. Usually she catches people because a writing assignment will say something like "using material from the readings..." and the students don't care enough to provide the readings to the AI so the AI writes something coherent but which brings in a bunch of material that wasn't covered and that the student doesn't know anything about.
Five years ago you cheated on a writing assignment by paying somebody else to do it. Today you type a few words. She's getting 10-20% of the class admitting to cheating when initially confronted. There doesn't seem to be a pattern in who cheats. The bad students who don't come to class cheat. The good students who pay attention in class cheat. It is everywhere.
It's endemic and it predates AI. I took a CS class 15 years ago where >40% of the class was caught copying the class project off of pastebin (no clue if it was specifically bait or student code that had a tell-tale error).
I've spent a lot of time in academia and the fact is, people will cheat if they can. That's why you have to implement proctoring and oral exams to prevent cheating. Because if cheating is a strategy that gets you a job and money, it will be implemented regardless. People are not ethical on average.
I think it is because we are implementing Goodharts law on a society scale.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
Many people see others taking short cuts and getting rewarded so that is seen as a legitimate path now. This works short term but errodes the foundations of that society over time.
So yeah this tracks for how things are going.
Having a degree itself used to be a pretty good measure of something, and now it's pretty meaningless. (Unless you don't have one of course)