DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Joanne Jacobs: Is everybody cheating?

Cheating has become the norm on college campuses, professors tell Beth McMurtrie, who reports for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Students use AI to cheat on information discussion boards, says Amy Clukey, an associate English professor at the University of Louisville. They cheat on essays.

A few weeks ago, she emailed a student to say that she knew the student had cheated on a minor assignment with AI and if she did it again, she would fail the course. Clukey also noted there were several missed assignments. The student replied to “sincerely apologize,” said she was “committed to getting back on track,” and that she regretted “any disruption [her] absence or incomplete work may have caused in the course.” But her next paper was essentially written by artificial intelligence. Curious, Clukey asked ChatGPT to write an email apologizing to a professor for plagiarism and missed work. . . “It spit out an email almost exactly like the one I had gotten.”

“Professors in writing-intensive courses, particularly those teaching introductory or general-education classes” say “AI abuse has become pervasive,” writes McMurtrie. “Clukey said she feels less like a teacher and more like a human plagiarism detector, spending hours each week analyzing her students’ writing to determine its authenticity.”

Well of course they’re all using AI to cheat. All students dream of one day being as cool as the people who appear in Apple’s latest iPhone ads: