What should professors do about AI generated papers? When I returned to teaching from a sabbatical last year I noticed that the students in my general education history classes suddenly learned how to write. Were they using ChatGPT to write their essays on Thomas Paine and Frederick Douglass? Probably. As a professor who believes that part of my job is to make students better writers, I didn’t know how to respond to this. I did not have the time to try to figure out whether these students were submitting AI generated papers. So I punted. To use University of California philosophy professor Troy Jollimore’s words, I “turned a blind eye to it” and gave “every paper the benefit of the doubt, no matter how unlikely it might be that it was written by a human hand.” There were just going to be some students, as Jollimore writes, who want to “make it through college unaltered, unscathed. To be precisely the same person at graduation, and after, as they were on the first day they arrived on campus. As if the whole experience had never really happened at all.”
Jollimore’s recent piece at The Walrus, as depressing as it is, has forced me to think more deeply about all of this. Here is a taste:
I could, of course, turn a blind eye to it and give every paper the benefit of the doubt, no matter how unlikely it might be that it was written by a human hand. I could say, as some of my colleagues do, that I trust all of my students, and that it is better to trust and sometimes be wrong than to be suspicious and right. I could go along with all of the people who have said to me: It’s not your job to force people to be virtuous. Let cheaters cheat. In the long run, they only hurt themselves, denying themselves the real education they could be gaining (and for which, after all, they or their parents are paying a fair bit of money).
This is a lovely set of thoughts, and it would make my life a good deal easier if I could bring myself to embrace it. But I can’t. (I’m an ethics professor, for crying out loud.) For one thing, while it is true that the cheaters are cheating themselves out of an education, it does not follow that they are harming only themselves. There is no getting around the fact that a central part of my job is deciding who passes and who fails. Some of my students still do write their own papers. They still do the readings. They want to learn. (And then there are those who don’t but have enough integrity that they follow the rules nonetheless.) My papers are hard to write, and the readings can be hard to understand; it’s philosophy, after all. These students are working. The effort they put in is real, and I appreciate and admire it.
It would be an egregious wrong to reward both sets of students equally, to force the honest students to compete for jobs, for scholarships, for admission to graduate schools on an equal footing with those who have “earned” their grades by submitting work that is not theirs.
Of course, should such cheating continue to be widespread, it seems inevitable that all college degrees will be worth a good deal less and will perhaps cease to offer any advantage at all. But this outcome is surely of little comfort to those willing to work for their degrees, those who want those degrees to continue to be worth something and to mean something.
And this:
But let’s pretend, for a moment, that it’s true: students who cheat harm only themselves. Even though I am certainly angry at those students who choose to cheat, the fact is that I also care about them and feel a certain degree of compassion for them. I don’t want them to miss out on the opportunity to become educated, not even as the result of their own poor choices.
It’s a bit of a Catch-22. How can we expect them to make good choices, about their studies or anything else, if they have not yet been given the tools to think critically? How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more? Or, worse, to see it as bearing no value at all, as if it were a kind of confidence trick, an elaborate sham?
My life, like anyone’s, could have gone in a lot of different directions. As it happens, I was lucky enough to end up majoring in a subject—philosophy—that I love, and whose pursuit has allowed me to enjoy the benefits of genuine learning. So I am in a position to know and appreciate what a difference education makes to the quality of your life. The vastness of the world it opens up to you while simultaneously instilling in you the curiosity to explore it. The sense of perspective it offers, enabling you to view the events of your life, and the events of whatever historical moment it is yours to live through, in a much larger context, rather than being resigned to viewing them from a standpoint of uncomprehending ignorance, as if they were all happening for the first time and for no discernible reason.
The fact is, I want my students, all of them, to have that kind of experience, to have the opportunity to live that kind of life. I don’t want them to be cheated out of it. I don’t want this, even if they themselves are the ones they are cheating….
Read the entire piece here.
Great piece. I’m flummoxed that anyone could think cheaters are only harming themselves. By skating through without getting an education, they enter the world as an uneducated person. If we believe education is valuable and important because it makes humans better at everything they’ve been educated in–from their vocations to their civic participation to their parenting to their sermon-listening and everything else–how is that not a harm to everyone they touch? We can surely see it in the doctor who cheated through medical school and now misses a diagnosis, literally killing a patient. Take that as a microcosm of what cheating does in less immediately visible forms. And, obviously by granting a diploma, the school is engaged in fraud, by certifying that the person is competent when they aren’t. But, of course, the school was itself deceived by the faculty, who vouched for the student’s performance without doing due diligence in the classroom. This, as noted, is bad–will do real harm–to the school’s reputation*, and to higher education in general. All of that will in myriad ways come back to bite the faculty.
Also obviously, it is a scandal that the institutions have essentially said to the faculty, “Good luck! You figure out how to navigate this brave new digital world! We will, however, evaluate you on ‘student satisfaction,’ meaning, you better keep the students happy, which means letting them do as they wish and grading them generously. Also, watch out you’re not ‘discriminating’ against a student with a disability accommodation who might sue us because they need to use their devices in the classroom, etc.” Faculty *don’t* have the time or the skills to keep up with every new electronic development, and the fact that the institution is basically AWOL on these matters–there’s no policy to point to, and certainly next to zero concrete help–is just borderline criminal.
* Example: We had a graduate of our adult-ed business program–which is run a bit like a diploma mill, depending on the professor–whose incompetence in basic business skills and information technology was so complete that it led to him losing his job, and the organization that had hired him declaring they would never hire another graduate of our program; you can be sure his supervisor wasn’t quiet about it with his network of peers in other companies. So there go all those potential jobs for our graduates because on just one student. Of course students harm others as well as themselves. Including the professors: as a school loses reputation, better students will avoid it, leading to dumber and dumber students in the classroom, more cheating, a diminution or even collapse of job satisfaction for the faculty, and etc.
Who (faculty or “institution”) is better situated–or more likely–to address the situation that we have come to rely on ways of achieving our educational goals that can now be done by machines? Obviously, that doesn’t mean our educational goals really are achieved, and in the long run that will show (by the collapse of society or the rise of the machines).
I am in my last semester of 30+ years of college and university teaching, and so am leaving this apocalyptic challenge to others.
In the short run, and to address John F’s example, I am no longer sure that I can evaluate (hence teach) student ability to write. So I continue to try and teach them to think, and evaluate that, as follows: I have long ended a course in ethical theory assigning a short essay which explains one of the issues we’ve studied and argues for a position on the question. Assignment is still the same–pick an issue, work through the details, take a position, formulate and defend an argument…all except for the last step (write it down and hand it in). Instead, come to my office and explain it to me. I can get a rough sense of the level of mastery in about 40 seconds, and not only fine tune it in a 10 or 12 minute conversation, but every student walks out of the conversation knowing more than when they came in. And the students who earn C-, or D, or F only do know more about their topic, they know what was required for success and that they didn’t achieve it.
Do they know that a machine couldn’t do it (understand)? Is this a satisfactory alternative to a paper? Is it scalable? Not sure. But this is the direction we…meaning higher ed not me, I’m out…have to go.
I have the privilege of offering the entire first-year class of our college a lecture on Plato’s allegory of the cave and Socates’ Apology. Last couple of years, and one more time this month, I have framed it around the question “What would Socrates think of chatGPT?” And one of the questions I throw down: If the results of an education is what a machine can do, why would you come to this college and pay all this money?” I urge them to figure that out, or quit now. Maybe we all should…
A friend teaches at a school where some courses are designated with a “W” for writing. Students must take a certain number of them. It’s the same content as a class without the designation, but with more writing. More papers, graded more rigorously. He does what Storm indicates above, except they do write up their essay, and print two copies. He reads it, then has each come to his office to read it to him. It becomes apparent immediately who didn’t write their paper: incapacity to articulate the sentences meaningfully, inability to pronounce certain words, ignorance of what some words mean, silence when asked “What did you mean by that?” Sometimes the student just bursts out in tears immediately because they realize they’ve been caught, before he even says anything. Faculty are given a reduced load for teaching these, and enrollment is limited to a manageable number. More schools could do that, if they had the will.