Battleground AI: Stop Blaming the Teachers
As a veteran teacher, I have battled cheating in the classroom since before students could copy and paste on a computer. I’ve seen it all: crib notes for tests, whole essays hand-copied from library resources, and the names changed on previous students’ work. Once we began using computers in the classroom, that became copy and paste from any one of a million online resources. It’s not hard to catch if you know the abilities of your students. It’s even easier to catch when you can look at previous drafts.
However, AI is making this tougher for all of us in the business of trying to teach students to think and comprehend. Teachers must have freaked out when calculators became widely available, just like we are with AI, but it was a lot easier to spot a calculator among the paper and books than a right-click. It doesn’t take much effort to use a tool like Google Lens, ChatGPT, or my buddy Claude to do anything from answering math problems to writing research papers.
AI can be a wonderful learning tool. Don’t get me wrong; I see the value of it as a resource. It can break concepts down and explain things step-by-step to young minds. It can help with editing by finding errors (not fixing them) that might have gone unnoticed. It will give you ideas when you’re brainstorming and completely out of brain power. So let me make this clear: I do not think AI is evil incarnate or the end of humanity. But like everything else, it’s what you make of it. A car can be a great tool to get you from point A to point B, but it can also be used to kill someone on a sidewalk. The choices human beings make on an individual level make the difference.
Teachers are looking for help everywhere, and like our students, we turn to online sources. If you search for something like, “…help me I’m dying out here as a teacher because they’re all using AI to cheat…”, you get 10,000 articles claiming that a new AI policy will solve the problem and that students cheat out of fear of failure.
Hogwash.
Balderdash.
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OK… bullshit (mostly).
Sure, some students are afraid of failure and desperately use anything to reduce that anxiety. However, too many of them are just taking the easy way out.
At first, we were encouraged to learn about AI and to use it to help us in the classroom. Peachy. Any time-saver is welcome to a busy teacher. Administrators have piled things on my plate every year without taking anything away, and I work nights and weekends to keep my head above water. I use AI every single day as a teacher to aggregate data, help create rubrics that make sense to students and not just me, change the reading level of an article, and jazz up or modernize lessons I’ve done in the past. I’m even it to proofread this article, because it is a great tool to help us do our best. But this is MY article. That is the difference between my use and students using it to cheat.
I’ve done the hard work of learning to read, comprehend, and write. Many students have not put in the time and effort, and AI is dragging reading comprehension scores, which were already sinking, to rock bottom. One does not learn to make connections from reading if Claude is doing all the work after a right-click and paste. Students do not learn to put full thoughts together in writing if ChatGPT does it for them. They (and my district’s administrators) do not realize that the cute emojis copied and pasted along with the AI-generated words are dead giveaways. Admin… we’re laughing at all the emails you send with paragraphs that begin with an emoji. Just sayin’…
Maybe a policy change can frame it better, but students will still use it to cheat. Some articles tell us to teach students to use it ethically. Fine. Now we’re teaching them how to use it, and they do: to cheat more efficiently. The overarching “solution” to this issue is to blame the teacher, just like the system does for every other problem in education. They say teachers aren’t framing it right, aren’t creating AI-proof lessons, don’t have the right policy, and on and on. At this point, it’s mind-numbingly predictable and cheap on the part of the institution of American education. Now that’s lazy. How about really looking at the issue with the goal of solving the problem, without blaming the people who work directly with students every day?
When do we get to bring back personal responsibility instead of blaming the teacher? AI didn’t create this problem. It just made the shortcuts easier. Ask any employer or college professor and they will tell you that we are in trouble as a society. Work ethic is dying. Taking initiative is archaic. Making excuses and expecting to be the exception to the rule is the norm.
Now, we can chalk this article up to the ramblings of some old crank in the classroom who should retire, or we can take a hard look at the current issues and the inevitable outcome for our students and our society. If we keep closing our eyes to problems and consequences, how can we expect anything to get better?
It’s apparent that no one has the answers right now. So, I did what our students do. I asked Claude, the AI from Anthropic. (Somewhere in this process, “it” became “he.” I’m choosing not to think too hard about that.) Ironically but not unexpectedly, he offered some wisdom that I think cuts to the heart of the matter: “If the finished essay is all that gets graded, I’m a shortcut. If the thinking is graded (the drafts, the in-class writing, the conversation where a student has to explain their argument out loud), I’m much less useful for cheating.” Basically, Claude said grade the process.
Great. I’ll get right on that somewhere between lunch and midnight.
