Is using AI in school cheating?

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Is Using AI Cheating?

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This essay takes its title from the question everyone in education seems to be asking right now: is using AI to do schoolwork cheating?

There are funny videos online of students sitting down with their laptops, reading an essay prompt from their teacher, prompting AI to write the essay, submitting it, closing the laptop, and being on their way. The student is a middle man of prompting between teacher and AI. It is an absurdity that undermines the whole activity.

fig. · the AI already envelops the whole sequence; the prompt waits at each person for the output to come back before moving on

The teacher's prompt is trying to get the student to do the act of writing an essay, to produce evidence of their understanding of a topic and their ability to communicate it. Even though the output might be correct, and increasingly AI's outputs are pretty dang good, having AI produce the essay is not evidence of the student's understanding, or of their ability to communicate it. If AI went away tomorrow, that student might not be able to produce a similar essay. And that seems to be a problem: what we really want is for the student to be able to produce that essay without AI doing it for them.

And notice: there is already an interesting involvement of AI in education, well beyond cheating. The main participants, the state, the teacher, the student, the employer, are all using AI to understand what is happening in schools and to take part in them. One way or another, AI has already become a co-creator of the educational experience.

But even before AI made this prompting chain a possible, cheating was a problem. If a student paid another student to write the essay, or went online and paid somebody to write it, we would call that cheating. So AI is not uniquely causing the problem. But it is exacerbating it, because it has made it very, very cheap and easy to not write the essay, or do the other performative paperwork of schooling.

But specifically, why do we care whether a student actually writes the essay or just prompts AI to write it? Some reasons:

One reason is that schools are like weird extensions of HR departments. Over the first 18 to 22-plus years of a student's life, we are trying to evaluate what they know and what they can do, so we can sort them into roles and professions and help employers find the right people to do the job. We really want to know who knows what and who can do what. It seems to matter a lot. If students are cheating en masse, the evidence of who is right for a job is compromised, and our ability to recognize who should do what, and why, erodes.

Another reason is that the activities of school can shape you. Having to show up every day, five days a week, and be there on time, ready to absorb knowledge, to compose that knowledge into the ability to write essays and do equations and solve problems, are all pretty good things to learn how to do. And you learn to do hard work. You learn self-discipline. You learn to set a goal and reach it through effort and grit. School is an environment where students learn to do this. And if you use AI to complete your assignments, that undermines this formative work.

fig. · doing school: the same ritual, every day, for years and years and years

The analogy I like to use is that this is similar to going to the gym and having a robot lift the weights for you. That would be incredibly self-defeating. You would not leave having achieved your goal: working your body, getting stronger, building cardiovascular capacity. Similarly, if you go to school and have AI do everything for you, you have not achieved the formative good of school.

fig. · have the robot lift for you and you leave the gym exactly as you came

So we have two things AI short-circuits: the meritocratic sorting goal, and the formative goal of school.

fig. · two circuits, sorted and run through the same chip, and cut by it

Given that students are using AI to try to "cheat" their way through school, or at least their use of AI is making it difficult to really understand how effective schooling is at imparting know-how and identifying who should do what and why, it is worth asking why they are doing it. Worth asking the students themselves, of course, but this essay may give us a framework for exploring it with them.

Why are students using AI to “cheat”?

This is hard to answer simply. Which students are we talking about? There is a vast diversity of experiences students have. There are over 13,000 school districts in the U.S., each with its own school board. There is a huge disparity between the poorest-funded schools and the wealthiest: the resources students can access, where the school sits relative to home, whether they walk or get dropped off or ride a 40-minute bus from the rural countryside, what is actually taught (which, despite decades of standardization, still varies), who they go to school with, the home lives and economic resources of their neighborhoods. To speak about school in the U.S. is not to speak about a monolithic thing. This won't be an exhaustive diagnosis. But it is still the right question to ask.

fig. · over 13,000 districts, each with its own board and boundary, packed tight in the East and stretched wide across the rural West. (source: the official NCES school district map, U.S. Department of Education.)

Here is a hypothesis. When the ability to cheat becomes extremely easy and cheap, students cheat because we have made it so totally unobvious why doing the things asked of them is actually good for them. We adults may think that going to school is like going to the gym, and it should be obvious to students that they shouldn't use AI to cheat because they are in fact cheating themselves. But the fact that students are using AI to cheat to me suggests that it is not obvious to them how doing school is to their formative benefit.

fig. · the artifact, with none of the formation, in unimaginable supply

Why might it not be obvious to students that doing school is formatively good for them? At least one unifying experience all students face is an extreme, competitive, meritocratic pressure. The one thing No Child Left Behind and Common Core and the rest have reliably produced is a Chinese gaokao-like pressure to succeed along bureaucratic performances of intellectual feats. If the most important thing about school is winning that performance, and you suddenly have a tool that produces the very evidence adults are looking for, it makes a lot of sense to use it.

THE GAP BETWEEN TOP AND BOTTOM

fig. · the sorting: widen the gap and the stakes rise, and so does the pressure on the competition, and on schools

What the adults say they care about is that you are actually the one who could write the essay. But the way they determine that is by grading the artifact, so it is the production of a correct artifact that matters. And AI is very good at producing correct artifacts.

In these circumstances, we have not made it obvious to students that:

writing that essay is in fact good for them, because learning to shape a thought into words is part of becoming someone who can move other people

doing that homework by hand is in fact good for them, because that is where the capability actually takes root, and with it the agency to become who they want to be

studying hard and then performing closed-book, from memory and skill, is in fact good for them, because learning to embody knowledge and skills gives shape to who you are, even if later you augment that will tools

fig. · every identity bent into one climb to a single winner; the rest fall into the shadow, their names warped and subsumed

We have made it difficult for ourselves to organize schooling around the formative good of students. The meritocratic competitive eclipses the formative goods, and it is a symptom of a deeper set of goals. We have asked schools to deliver justice in our society, not just education. The way we made schools responsible for social justice is by using them to distribute "opportunity." If every student receives an equal opportunity to potentially succeed, then our economic and political system, which is always answering who does what and who gets what and why, is justified. Even if the outcomes are very unequal, who can complain, since they were given the same shot as everyone else? So we placed the work of justice on the student, the teacher, and the family to take advantage of a competition and try to win, because we've abandoned doing justice within the realm of politics. There is little recourse outside of winning this competition for hoping for achieving a better and more comfortable life in our society. This is why the stakes in education feel so high and the competition is so fierce.

This greatly distracts from doing right by the formative potential of students. To the extent that we care about the formative good of students, we are making a bet: that the formative good of students is aligned with, and served by, the meritocratic competition we have set up. Fortunately there is some overlap. Spending 18-plus years competing in reading, writing, math, and science does have some good formative effects. You can get disciplined. You do learn a lot about the world. But it is a narrow curriculum toward a narrow set of competitive goals:

do really well in school

get high grades

outcompete your peers

get recognized by colleges

pick difficult majors aligned with lucrative careers

outcompete your peers

land the jobs

A snag. There are not an infinite number of high-paying jobs, and we now compete for them with students around the entire globe. At different stages, some students begin to feel they are not going to win. If the competition is justified in terms of winning it, and you see there is not enough space at the top for you, then all that work starts to feel a lot less justified. This is where we fall back on "but it's good for you," argument - do it so you won't become lazy, so you become disicplined, using the formative goods of school as a secondary, conciliatory justification.

The competitive version sends everyone racing up one narrow chute toward a single prize at the top. And the climb is bought: private tuition, daily tutors, summer camps, test prep, admissions consultants, each rung another bill. A few reach the landing. Most fall back, some into lesser buckets, many onto the ground.

fig. · the chute: a bought climb to one prize, a few make it, most fall

We talk of AI as cheating, but look at what we have come to treat as ordinary, because of high stakes schooling. We use performance-enhancing drugs in school, ADHD medications for example, to win. We use money to buy an edge, paying for tutoring services like Kumon. We will chemically and financially optimize a child to take the prize.

A CHILDHOOD, BRANDED

fig. · an after-school childhood sold as the way to win. (the Kumon mark, a registered trademark, shown here as the thing under discussion.)

Students recognize that who they want to become may be inaccessible to them, not because they couldn't do it, but because they might not be able to win the competition to get access to the resources and support to do it. They might also see the alternatives offered to them are not rewarded by society. We have put the inequalities of this competition more and more in each other's faces. The rewards for winning grow graver and more public, raising the stakes, and raising the psychological blow

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