AI and the Erosion of Student Knowledge and Integrity
Mr. Know Nothing
About a year after ChatGPT became widely available, a student handed in a particularly terrible AI-written essay in my graduate online communities class. At the time, my course policy said AI wasn’t allowed. (I’ve now changed the policy to discourage but allow it. Students are going to use AI at their jobs, so our responsibility is to teach them to use it ethically and thoughtfully.)
I decided not to penalize the student, since I couldn’t conclusively prove he used AI (detectors are not fully reliable), but I asked to meet with him. First, I asked him about the content of the specific assignment. “OK, I’m not taking any points off, but tell me what you were thinking about this topic?” He stammered and had nothing to say. I continued, “OK no problem, tell me about this general area of course content?” He knew nothing. I took a deep breath and followed up, asking him an easy question about the basic content we learned in the first few weeks of class. He knew nothing. About anything.
Welcome Back to Blue Books
My “Design of Online Communities Class” is project-based, and for decades I have given no exams. Their big project — to do a real study of an online group, including learning to do human subjects’ research ethically and collecting original data — is more than enough work. But in response to Mr. Know Nothing and his fellow travelers, I have changed the class to have closed-book exams, in person, on paper. It’s a sad but necessary turn of events.
A Vicious Cycle of Bad Habits
In my undergraduate quantum mechanics class in 1985, I went to the review session with the TA before the midterm. The TA put four questions on the board and discussed them. I raised my hand and asked a somewhat esoteric question. The TA answered, “I could answer that, but why don’t you just study these four problems?” Students in the review session all looked at one another — is he saying what I think he’s saying? Someone else asked a question, and got the same answer — just study these four problems. My motivation to study for the exam plummeted. And sure enough, I showed up for the midterm and the four questions on the board were the actual exam questions. Quantum and I were never destined to be pals, but after the midterm my attentiveness to the course content went down further. And I approached the final exam review with trepidation — was the TA going to give us the questions again? He did, so I memorized answers to those four questions, and got an A-minus in the class, having learned next to nothing. Someone should have told our professor what was going on, but no one did.
At that moment in my undergraduate career, I had already decided that my future didn’t lie with physics. If I cared about physics, I would have done the work anyway. But I honestly didn’t.
All of this is exactly what I see happening in the classes I teach now. With easy ways to bypass doing actual work, students’ motivation is declining. Once you start skipping work (like not studying much for my quantum midterm), studying later in the semester becomes harder both motivationally and cognitively.
I’m sure some of my quantum classmates kept up with the content — in fact, two went on to be world-renowned scholars in related fields. What we got was a bimodal distribution of learning outcomes: a small group who did the work and learned the content, and a larger group who did not. And this is what I’m seeing in my classes now — the students who care are learning well, and others less so, to a degree unprecedented in my nearly thirty-year teaching career. With my return to paper-based, closed-book exams, the ones who don’t care are now at least getting a light introduction to the content. But it’s still dispiriting as an instructor.
Ethical Temptation and Decline
I should have reported the TA who gave us the exam questions — but I didn’t and neither did my classmates. The easy availability of a method of cheating led to an ethical decline in all of us, and we let the situation persist through the final exam. Once you start cheating, the barriers to additional cheating go down.
Cheating is becoming rampant. A core assignment of online communities class is to interview members of the community you are studying. Last fall, multiple students used generative AI to make fake interview transcripts. Even if you believe that using AI to help write a paper is acceptable, faking human subjects’ data clearly is not. One student didn’t even make their paper reporting on what they learned in interviews match the content of their faked interview transcripts. I wonder if the student even read any of what they handed in. I don’t think people arrive at this egregious behavior all at once — they start with a small time-saver, and it progresses over time, across tasks, and across classes. More broadly, unethical behavior becomes normalized for both individuals and communities. Step by step, our collective integrity erodes.
In sum, the current situation is encouraging students to be both ignorant and dishonest. These patterns are widespread. Take a minute to read the subreddit r/professors — it’s filled with frustrated faculty seeing these same patterns.
The Path Forward
I hate doing this, but I am gradually removing writing assignments from my classes. I’m trying to find creative substitutes, like doing a verbal presentation about content to the class — though this is hard or impossible in larger classes. If you have tried something that worked, I’d love to hear about it — leave me a comment.
I feel bad for Mr. Know Nothing. He is entering a job market where entry-level jobs are increasingly being replaced by AI. Several entry-level workers are being replaced by one mid-level worker who is tasked with doing more work supported by AI. My hunch is that there will be fewer jobs overall, and great competition to get them. We don’t yet have methods for training students to go directly to mid-level jobs. To make matters worse, many of the students we are graduating are less knowledgeable than the previous generation. Would you hire Mr. Know Nothing at any job level? He’s doomed.
In sum, we have fewer jobs that are more demanding, and are graduating students who are more ignorant and less honest. What is our path forwards? We need to reinvent pedagogy to ameliorate both the knowledge and character challenges that are festering.
