Whenever i see people getting nostalgic for “old-fashioned” cheating on school assignments because at least it wasn’t LLM-generated, and their argument is “cheating used to require you to learn something,” I think they’re from another universe.
Cheating on school assignments, from what I know, has always had the potential to be either “somewhat learning-adjacent” or “entirely mindless.”
Before chat-whatever, yeah, sure, cheaters might manually copy their essays from somewhere (forcing them to engage with the material to a degree). But they also might copy-paste them from a shady website, or pay a classmate to write them (or coerce a classmate to write them with threats of being beaten up and shoved in a locker).
All of which would require the same amount of “actual engagement with the topic” as typing prompts into a generating program. Unless they looked through it afterwards to double-check stuff. Which, again, would be the same in either case.
As for standardized tests– yeah, some cheaters would painstakingly write the answers onto something they brought with them illicitly (and I’m sure they still do, when the test doesn’t allow them to bring a device capable of accessing LLMs). And yeah that does require some studying.
But, they also would do things like copy from the kid in front of them. Which could consist entirely of “looking at which circles on the answer sheet were getting penciled in,” and no actual “reading the questions.” Involving less engagement with the material than typing prompts. (And that’s assuming they even went to the test in the first place, and didn’t get a classmate to take it for them.)
The problem isn’t a specific technology. That specific technology has plenty of inherent problems, but that is not one of them.
It’s the fact that cheating on school assignments has been extremely common in many forms for a very long time– and that people who consider cheating normal are now in a whole lot of positions of power– and so they jump at the chance to push the idea that this new form of cheating is okay.
Which isn’t an attractive truth, because it doesn’t present any solutions (since “gaining enough power to kick cheaters out of power” could probably only be achieved by being a cheater, and then it’s anyone’s guess whether the decisions you make with that power will be any better than before.)
But then… gotta remember that “force the cheaters in power to outlaw LLMs” also doesn’t present a solution, for pretty much the same reasons.
do you see a lot of people in power encouraging kids to cheat? i have only met a few people in ed who like kids using ai, and they’re always that person. y'know. the type to always jump on fads cuz the fundamentals of their work just aren’t there.
politicians handwave it away because they understand nothing, are fearful to have any stance, and they have both a financial interest and inertia carrying them to always support big tech blindly.
i do think the problem is overblown a little bit though. like, as a world language teacher, kids have been using automatic translators to cheat since the 00s. it’s not slick, it’s very obvious if you know your kids and their output. if you can’t handle that, have students handwrite papers in person. like it’s just not that hard to solve. no one in undergrad or below is putting in so much work and expertise that requires hours of independent research anyway.
I’m not personally familiar with the current teaching landscape, but I hear occasional stories about people in positions of power in education being okay with LLM usage– more than I ever heard of being okay with earlier forms of cheating.
Though, maybe some of them feel it’s like a gray area that isn’t clearly defined yet as cheating. Like calculators (and how schools decided some lessons can allow calculators and some can’t, but I imagine when they first became available that was all up for debate)
That said, you are right that most cheaters in power don’t actively try to promote cheating (they got theirs and pulled up as many ladders behind them as possible, and they don’t have any real interest in helping others use their methods).
They’re just more okay with allowing it than people who actually care about integrity.