From quick glances towards another student’s exam to hiring someone else to write an essay, cheating has been around for probably as long as formal education.
Many college students are under pressure to figure themselves out in just four years. Keeping a scholarship often requires maintaining a high GPA, so students might turn towards cheating, and now a new generation of cheating tools are making their way into the classroom.
The old methods aren’t gone, but new ones might stand alongside them, things like artificial intelligence and a document-sharing site, Course Hero.
“It’s a money back guarantee, actually," said David Banas, doctoral candidate at Central Michigan University.
He knows of two students who used Course Hero to download material and cheat on assignments, he said. They used the site to plagiarize a former students’ work. Right now, he said the service eludes CMU’s plagiarism checker.
“There’s also something—if I may say so—nefarious about Course Hero," Banas said. "If you’re a paying member and your GPA does not improve, they’ll give you your money back.”
Banas hasn’t seen much cheating in the classes he’s taught, but he said it’s not something he can constantly monitor. In his experience, it can take up to fifteen hours to document one possible case of cheating by a student.
“We’re here to ensure that we instruct students. We’re here to maintain academic integrity as much as we can," Banas said. "But at the end of the day, we aren’t the cheating police. We’re supposed to do our best to make sure that it doesn’t happen, but we’re not going to catch every case of it. It’s honestly not our job.”
Catching cheating in essays is becoming harder through the advent of artificial intelligence. ChatGPT made headlines, though there are others like it. It’s a website that produces AI-generated text based on a question. Students use it to have the computer write their essay for them.
We were able to get in touch with one student who has used ChatGPT.
In one instance, he said he used it to cheat in a science class. He ran the questions through AI and checked the results with a detection tool. It came back 99-percent sure that the answer was AI-generated.
The student went back and asked ChatGPT to rewrite the assignment so it wouldn’t be detected by an AI. It rewrote the answers, and they were no longer flagged by the detection tool.
However, that’s not how he said he usually uses AI. He says he uses it more as a search engine and a teaching tool.
“I feel like students are feeling it out as much as professors are feeling it out," said Stan Kolek, visiting professor at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. He used to be a grad student at CMU, and since then he's seen cheating—and research—evolve through the use of AI.
“Some of my colleagues at Allegheny have encouraged students to use ChatGPT—research this question, see what ChatGPT gives you, follow along with those resources, determine if ChatGPT is actually valid and it’s doing the right thing," Kolek said.
A recent poll by a Stanford University student newspaper, found nearly 60-percent of student users said they used AI only as a way to outline and organize ideas.
Kolek said sometimes it’s easy to spot AI at work.
“It’s pretty easy to tell—as long as you know your students—who is using it and who is not using it," he said.
But not always. Daniel Lawson is an English professor at CMU, and he said he did his own research into the tool. It can be hard to tell if a paper was AI-generated. Artificial intelligence can mimic non-native speakers, for example. And the type of presentation a professor assigns can make a difference.
“Students who are less fluent in English and might be more likely to be accused of using such tools," he said. "And if they turn to oral presentations or do writing only in class or by hand, that could be a challenge for students not only learning English but those with certain learning disabilities.”
Lawson held a workshop recently to help teach faculty about AI-generated papers and software like ChatGPT.
"We invited faculty to take one of their current assignments and sort of feed it to the machine to see what it would produce in response," Lawson said. "Then we invited them to consider, ‘Alright, how do we maybe change some things where the same learning objectives are being met, but we’re engaging them in a way that perhaps facilitates more authentic student learning?”
At the end of the day, technology like ChatGPT and Course Hero—and whatever comes next—will change not only how students cheat, but also how they learn. The technologies are here now and likely to stay, and colleges will have to shift their thinking to accommodate shifting trends.