Cheating has always been a problem in American high schools, and IHS is no exception. Students can start to feel overwhelmed by schoolwork and see cheating as the only option. In the past, educators have always been able to curtail cheating within their classrooms by employing tools like GoGuardian which track students’ online behavior during the school day. While these methods can still be somewhat effective, the recent rise of chatbots such as the recent ChatGPT presents an enormous challenge. Such platforms can write essays, poems, and creative stories in a variety of styles and genres. ChatGPT can perform at the level of a high-achieving high schooler most of the time. Submitting its work as your own original composition is an increasingly tempting option, regardless of academic standing. Students struggling in lower-level classes may see it as a low-risk guarantee of passing the course, and highly motivated overachievers can find themselves with more work than they have time to do. Cheating using artificial intelligence is thus not confined to one sector of the student population.
Cheating is appealing to everyone, and cheating has been a pervasive practice since the beginning of time. Modern high schoolers are no exception. It seems that many of us have lost a sense of moral culpability. Machiavellian principles (results of actions justify the actions themselves) are tolerated, and in some cases, even nurtured. Some students may feel that lying and cheating are necessary to achieve their goals, so it is pardonable. It’s this attitude of moral relativism that cultivates a society in which people feel no shame in appropriating the work of a robot.
I am morally against academic disintegrity. Obviously, some do not share my beliefs. However, I can instead make the argument that in order for society to function we must have education in which students are forced to create their own work. We want our doctors and nurses to be competent and skilled, and not to have cheated through medical school. (ChatGPT can help you on your brain surgery quiz, but it can’t perform the surgery for you.) Those in specialized positions must be capable and knowledgeable. If we reward dishonesty and plagiarism, then we will promote people who lack the necessary skills and talents to important roles.
Regardless of the societal degeneracies creating the issue of widespread cheating, schools must find a way to address the problem. Some teachers say that they can tell if a student is using ChatGPT by comparing it to their writing from earlier in the year when the technology was not available. But such systems will not be effective in future classes, in which students have had access to chatbots since day one. Although occasional in-class writing
assignments may provide a general picture of a student’s capabilities, they are often not long enough to provide much helpful information. The only solution appears to be the more regular administration of in-class essays and other extended writing assignments. In short, to monitor cheating more closely and eliminate the threat of artificial intelligence, we must revert back to a semi-pre-digital age classroom system. As assignments would be built into the structure of the day, the amount of homework would be reduced. The benefits would include a decrease in students’ stress and depression levels. It’s clear to any observer that society cannot revert to pen and paper—technology has permeated us too greatly, so the aforementioned in-class essays should be typed using school Chromebooks. All internet access should be shut off, with GoGuardian activated to ensure no online searching.
No doubt some students will take to this article unkindly because it presents a very black-and-white picture: cheating is bad and honesty is good. While there are certainly exceptions to every rule, I can see no situation within the normal bounds of student life in which students must cheat, plagiarize, or appropriate others’ works for their own purposes.
Perhaps the hardest part of eliminating cheating using AI is what to do with the offenders. While I do believe that we do children a disservice by allowing them to go unpunished, we must also consider that high schoolers possess incompletely developed brains (the prefrontal cortex does not fully mature until age twenty-five) and may come from backgrounds or home environments that are impossible to predict. The difficulty of enforcing any behavioral rule is that authorities must straddle the line between love, discipline, and grace. All three are needed in a child’s development. No one rule can address the way we deal with lawbreakers. Each situation must be handled with extreme care and considered individually, especially when dealing with adolescents. Regardless, I believe that the aforementioned ideas could reduce cheating and increase student morale. Less homework, in-class essays, and careful online supervision is my advice for high schools struggling with ChatGPT and other forms of digital cheating.