A little reflection on academic dishonesty

A common objection to AI in education is if you give it to students, they’ll cheat^[1] . Which naturally leads to a basic thought experiment:

But, actually, that’s the wrong question. I’m not even sure that it’s a good question. In order to refine it, let’s splash around a few tidbits & anecdotes:

• To start with, when you have a moment listen to Episode 4 of the Homework Machine - by far, my favorite podcast about AI in education. The aforelinked episode gets entirely into the student perspective and involves students talking about times that they used AI, for good and for ill. With each story, consider: do you think the student cheated? Should they have?

• How about a personal anecdote? When I was a secondary school student, I repeatedly - maybe chronically - and sometimes flagrantly copied another student’s math homework. I was pretty unapologetic about this fact then and remain so now, because math homework was an instrument of control & compliance not an instrument of learning. The math department had all agreed that homework would be worth 10% of a student’s final grade, so even if a student scored perfectly on every exam they still couldn’t get an A in the class if they didn’t do their homework. I’m fairly confident the well-intentioned, midwestern Protestant work ethic reason behind this was something along the lines of “it’s important for the youth to learn the value of discipline and perseverance, so they need to learn how to do things through repetitive practice.” The problem - which I only kind of intuitively felt back then and understand much better today - is that mindless practice doesn’t produce that outcome. The practice needs to actually be rigorous & challenging. This was not that. I was able to assess from the practice that we did in class whether or not I could understand & apply the concept; an expert teacher could have done the same and then adjusted the homework requirements accordingly. Want to know why most math teachers didn’t do that? This was the thing that galled me the most about this setup: the reason they didn’t do that was because the way that they checked homework was for completion. At the beginning of class, they would walk the rows of desks while taking attendance and look to see whether a person had a complete looking sheet of homework on their desk. If they did, then they got credit for the homework assignment. There was no feedback or guidance for whatever amount of effort the student put in…whether that amount was low or high. So, before class I would borrow another student’s homework, copy it well enough to pass muster, and put that out for the homework check. At one point, the other student and I were so impressed by the absurdity of the situation that we decided to push the boundaries: I literally photocopied her homework and put the photocopy out for the homework check…and the teacher didn’t notice. So…was that cheating? Should it be?

• I’ve got another one: in my sophomore literature class, we did a poetry project. The project required each of us to pick a poet, produce a biography of the poet from at least 5 sources, and choose one of their poems and analyze it. In the lead up to the project, we read a lot of different poetry including several modernists and postmodernists. I thought postmodern poetry was kind of BS, so I concocted a plan truly befitting the definition of a sophomore as a wise idiot: instead of choosing a poet, I made one up. He was a post-Beatnik, Yale-educated son of privilege who produced a single chapbook before succumbing to a heroin addiction by the name of William Jerome Hollingsford. This being the early days of the public internet, I build him a full biography that I distributed across 5 different obscure websites. Then I synthesized them into the biography that I wrote for the project itself. I also wrote and published a handful of poems that could also be found on different obscure websites…all of which I had created. I chose one and analyzed & critiqued it. I got an A on the project. With the benefit of hindsight, I am certain that my phenomenal literature teacher knew exactly what was going on and both wanted to encourage a bit of a rebellious streak and recognized that I was doing way more work to subvert the assignment than I would have done to simply follow the assignment. So…was that cheating? Should it be?
• A couple weeks ago, I found myself in the school library of University Heights High School in the Bronx, talking with a group of students about - what else - artificial intelligence. My friend Wyman and I were asking them about a bunch of different AI use cases and whether they thought it was acceptable for students to use them on their schoolwork. For almost every use case, their answer was “it depends,” and the contextual nuances and differences they laid out indicated a depth of understanding of both the technology and the way they were expected to learn. They talked about the difference between using a chatbot as a peer-level thought partner versus an expert-level thought partner - both, they felt, were acceptable, but only the latter was something that should be disclosed. They mostly didn’t think it was acceptable to have an LLM produce an outline of a paper, but if they had a bunch of ideas and were trying to define and refine their argument then using an AI for that was acceptable - but also something that should be disclosed^[2]. The group was split about whether it was OK to have the LLM generate the first couple sentences of an introduction if they wrote the rest of an essay themselves, and they were delighted by the idea that an LLM could provide 5 sentences that would be randomly distributed throughout an essay such that they’d need to fill in the connective tissue but they mostly felt that was an inappropriate use. So…is it? Should it be?

All of this leads me to a refined question:

I’m certainly not here to say that everything falls in a gray area such that the idea of cheating is always debatable. A person could try and undermine the most meaningful parts of the learning process in a way that harms them and the system overall. The Varsity Blues scandal is still a scandal - and it didn’t even need artificial intelligence.

But it’s also fair for students to push back against their education as something that is being done to them, rather than something that they are actively participating in and shaping.

Using the refined question, I also started to consider when the answer to the question would have been “Not at all. Never.” Because there were a lot of classes in which and a lot of teachers for whom I would have faithfully completed an assignment that involved running into a burning building, no questions asked. It’s not to say that I wouldn’t have used an emerging technology like AI, it’s just that I wouldn’t have used it subversively.

I can identify 3 different variables that influence this equation^[3]:

• Care - this one has two dimensions: to what extent does the student perceive that the teacher actually gives a shit, and to what extent does the student believe that the teacher actually sees and give a shit about them as a person…not just a grade in a book.
• Meaning - to what extent can the teacher appeal to a reason why the thing they are asking of me is good for the student? And, to what extent can they recognize that the student is constructing their own sense of meaning that extends beyond a single academic discipline?
• Authority - there are two opposing sides to this coin: to what extent is the teacher able to draw on a well of demonstrable expertise? As opposed to, to what extent is the teacher appealing to positional authority that places them over the student^[4]?

One of the reasons that the degree of difficulty is so high to be a great teacher is because you have to be able to blend all 3 of these variables - and actually the full 6 dimensions within them - and adjust them situationally.

And doing so doesn’t even guarantee that students won’t still try to challenge or subvert your intentions. In fact, let me tell you one more story about subverting rules, just to complete the “Seth, you were such a little shit in secondary school” trilogy…

• Also in my sophomore year, our school was hosting a group of theatre kids from across the state as part of a big collaborative production we were staging. I - a hardcore theatre nerd - had convinced my parents that we could be a host family and have a few of the other theatre nerds stay at our house for the weekend. Because of the intense demands of the production, we had a curfew. And we, of course, broke that curfew. And the theatre director of my school, of course, found out. The following Monday, she came to my first period class, called me into the hallway, and read me the riot act complete with shouting, finger pointing, and if my memory serves me correctly even some stomping. I was shook. I apologized profusely. I swore that I would never do anything like that ever again. She was neither the first nor the last educator to read me the riot act, but she was the only one that actually registered with me. She was exercising all 3 variables to perfection: I knew she cared because I could see the number of hours she put in on every production we staged and how she demanded excellence, and I could see how she knew the lives of every single theatre kid inside & out^[5]. She knew that I cared about theatre, and more than being pissed about me breaking the rule she was pissed that I had made myself and others less prepared to work toward the excellence that she demanded. And she knew how to draw that excellence out of us, so her expertise was clear…and in this particular case she was also appealing to her situational authority - and it worked because it was a card that she had to play so rarely.

I’m particularly focused on secondary school because that’s where it feels like the potential for “cheating” is the most ripe; and in secondary school in particular it’s a natural part of human development that adolescents are going to be testing boundaries and pushing their limits^[6].

In my story, the director accepted my apology, and she never mentioned it again. I never felt that my opportunities in our high school theatre were limited because I had transgressed a boundary…but I also didn’t feel like I had to somehow play it safe around her either. Two years later, when I wanted to do an independent study on political theatre, she was the person who signed on to supervise and introduced me to the work of Bertolt Brecht^[7].

I think this is where I want to land this month, because the question of AI and cheating when it comes to the growth, development, and evolution of a human isn’t actually about either AI or cheating. The critical elements that matter - the attentiveness of others, their willingness to share their expertise, the establishment of a standard of excellence and an environment to uphold it, etc - aren’t technological, and the way that we respond to a person who pushes against the constraints they encounter doesn’t need to be punitive.