AI and Cheating

 One of the biggest concerns teachers have about AI in the classroom is AI being used to cheat. Now, cheating with AI can look different in different classrooms or different from assignment to assignment. One of the important things you as a teacher will need to do if you're going to have students using AI in your classroom is to set up guidelines and parameters for how and when AI can be used for a particular assignment (learn more about that by coming to my last 2 PD sessions on AI). So, for the purposes of this post, I'd like to focus on cheating with AI in the form of writing. Kids will often complain about having to write essays or research papers, and the temptation to have AI do the work might be tempting to some. We would like to think that our teacher spidey sense and knowledge of our students would kick in and we would recognize it right away, but that may not happen. There may also be a temptation to use an AI detector, but they're finicky tools. Putting your total faith in them is a mistake, quite honestly. Anecdotally, there have been stories of AI detectors flagging student work as AI generated when it's written by non-native English speakers. So an AI detector may be a jumping off point, but it certainly should not be the judge and jury.

So, what's a teacher to do? Well, Tech & Learning magazine recently put out an article called, "7 Ways to Detect AI Writing Without Technology." And it's a gem! I encourage you to take the time to read the entire article, but in the meantime, here's a TL;DR for you:

• AI generated text tends to be long, so do some digging if a submission from a student seems longer than they normally write.
• AI generated text often doesn't seem to completely cover the requirements of the assignment even when it's overly long.
• AI writing seems emotionless even when writing about emotional things, so pay attention to how you feel when reading the words on the page.
• Lots of lists and bullet points come out of AI, so if there's a list or bullet point when there doesn't need to be one, time to investigate.
• No mistakes -- when the grammar and spelling are perfect, or the grammatical structure is fantastic, it's not unreasonable to suspect AI. Heck, even teachers make typos (just ask your students to find your typos -- they're happy to point them out haha).
• The writing is not like previous writing the student has done. Even when we're working on our students having voice in their writing, they still have a voice. 
• You gut is telling you something is rotten in Denmark. This is why teachers can never be replaced by AI! You know your students, and you start to know what their work is like, so when something is turned in that doesn't feel like "them," see if you can find anything out.

So, you suspect or even know something has been generated by AI. Now what? Well, remember, we're dealing with KIDS, and school is for LEARNING, so make it a learning experience! Some suggested discussion questions to have with the student:

• Did you use AI to do any of the work for this assignment?
• How much did you do? How much did the AI do?
• Why did you decide to use AI to help you?
• How did the results of what the AI generated for you make you feel? Confident? Nervous? Satisfied?
• Do you think there is something else you could have done to get this work finished without using AI? 
• What do you think is the best way to handle this? Re-do? New assignment? Any consequence?

If a consequence is warranted, that's fine, but ultimately, kids need to learn how to co-exist with AI in education, so we as teachers need to be their guides.

What are your thoughts? I'd love to hear them in the comments!