Teachers and professors can make adjustments in how they teach that will greatly reduce incidents of student cheating with AI. It turns out, those changes aren’t much different than what worked to deter previous cheating methods.
That’s the argument of Tricia Bertram Gallant, a longtime expert in academic integrity who is director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California San Diego. As she sees it, when it comes to student cheating in the age of AI, “everything has changed, and nothing has changed.”
Gallant co-authored the forthcoming book, “The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI,” with David Rettinger, associate chair of psychology at the University of Tulsa.
“A lot of teachers think that only bad students cheat, and they think that students cheat intentionally or viciously,” she says. But she says it’s important to remember that students are only human, and that some humans have always cheated in certain situations — especially young people still figuring out their ethics and values.
Remembering that most students aren’t looking to be cheaters can “take down the temperature” so that instructors don’t “get so worked up about it.”
Gallant acknowledges, though, that in the past two years new AI tools have increased the prevalence of student cheating — which has been especially challenging for college professors. “ChatGPT is just ubiquitous,” she says. “It’s free to access. It’s much quicker than any classmate is going to be. And it feels safer. It feels anonymous, right? It feels like I’m not letting anybody know I’m doing this.” That is causing frustration for many instructors.
But the solutions that this expert recommends haven’t changed. “It’s to teach for integrity, and there’s certain things you can do, and they work — whether AI’s in the picture or not.”
To Gallant and many other experts on student cheating, the best strategy is to focus on how assignments and tests are designed, rather than turning to tools to try to detect high-tech cheating.
For this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we connected with Gallant to hear her tips for how teachers and professors can respond to AI. One key, she says, is for educators to understand the most common reasons that students cheat in the first place.
Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or on the player below.