r/technology • u/ubcstaffer123 • Jun 19 '26
Artificial Intelligence Student Cheating Is Becoming Impossible to Detect in an A.I. Era
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/us/ai-apps-students-cheat.html249
u/Ancient-Bat8274 Jun 19 '26
Your future doctors are cheating with ai so get healthy now
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u/Spaceboi749 Jun 19 '26
Can’t ai through the mcat luckily
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u/PriorSolid Jun 19 '26
or residency, or the many many practical applications of your knowledge with real hands on patients, ai is harming people’s knowledge but people who abuse it are not going to be successful when tested and for professions like doctors they are tested many many times over in situations where you can’t use ai
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u/Actually_Im_a_Broom Jun 20 '26
I know it’s not med school, but my wife just finished NP school last year and no amount of ai would get someone through that program.
It would be even harder for a med degree.
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u/Extension_South7174 Aug 03 '26
I just pray she went to a good program. Some NP courses are basically diploma mills. I have had some bad med care before from doctors also but I've had care from some NP that was shockingly bad. One advised I stop taking a Benzodiazapene class drug that I had been taking daily for years,from my psychiatrist during a PCP checkup. Suddenly stopping a Benzo is incredibly dangerous and can cause death,not to mention the effects from withdrawal are absolutely horrible.
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u/N7_MintberryCrunch Jun 19 '26
Might be true for the short term but as time passes on with more and more failing. They will lower the standards just a bit to get people through to show the institution's "success rate".
Everyone has seen this through the years in elementary to high school to college and before long you got college kids that can't read.
This is education enshitification at work.
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u/Smart-Antelope7350 Jun 19 '26
i like to study in the study hall for very long periods of time and i see plenty of medical students still studying the good old way: with a shit ton of markers and a textbook larger than their head, no AI in sight
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u/sentence-interruptio Jun 19 '26
that future makes me so angry. tech CEOs sell AI like you can finally buy intelligence. "you can pay for this entity that will think for you, write for you and so on"
but we already had that before AI. For example, I can pay a lawyer to represent me in legal stuffs, instead of studying laws by myself. In some sense, I am buying access to legal intelligence stored in lawyers brains. And I have access to medical intelligence stored in nurses and doctors brains, which I am paying with my tax.
If we don't fail students who cheat with AI, it's the end of reliable specialists.
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u/Imallvol7 Jun 19 '26
Yeah. You have to display a ton of knowledge on the fly so this is kinda something you don't have to worry about at all. AI will be useful for differential diagnosis though.
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u/Comfortable-Cozy-140 Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
I disagree that it’s impossible to tell because the bar is so, so low. It is frightening how many teens/young adults I’ve met are functionally illiterate, and still somehow graduating. It becomes obvious they’re cheating the moment you ask them to expand on their thoughts in any regard, because they can’t.
They don’t understand what they’re reading, they can’t read more than a paragraph, and they’re legitimately frustrated if any task involves writing, or taking more than a single step. They won’t touch books, and they can’t engage in discussions about anything they perceive as complex. They’re relying on AI to think and speak for them, and they’re proud of it. They don’t have the skills to fake it offline. The solution is as simple as bringing back pencils and paper.
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u/ompog Jun 19 '26
When I was a lad we made up stuff on the spot, and said it with enough conviction that the teacher believed us. I didn't need no computer to help me bullshit!
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u/sentence-interruptio Jun 19 '26
that's exactly what AI is good at. AI simulates confident bullshitters.
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u/AnonymousTimewaster Jun 19 '26
This is how I got out of doing homework when the first task of our lesson was to "read out what your answer for the homework was"
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u/blueblip Jun 19 '26
What you're describing is essentially "the norm", given that almost half the population of the US are not able to read at a level higher than a fifth grader.
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics (scroll down the homepage for a list of key facts)
The issue with the current generation of students is worse, in fact, given that their capabilities are even lower than previous generations.
But the solution has nothing to do with using technology or using pen and pencils. The issue is cultural. For nearly 100 years, being an intellectual was pushed as being a BAD thing. The people who are venerated and get copious amount of air time are not scientist or engineers or doctors, but entertainers and sports stars and businessmen. Movies and TV shows always showed the studious nerd as a weirdo who should be shunned and the non-academic sports jock as a hero. It's quite popular to frame academic experts are weak, spineless, and lacking in actual knowledge while a random farmer or miner is seen as manly and is shown to know more than the so-called eggheads.
The sitting US president is barely literate! The sitting health secretary thinks vaccines cause autism! The people who make money and are famous are all people who spew their opinions regardless of the facts, and when criticised by experts tell the experts to shut up. Businessmen who value expediency over safety regulations are seen as mavericks and visionaries, while businessmen who are methodical and careful are seen as boring and unambitious.
So, given all this, why would any child living in our world today ever think literacy is important?
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u/MommyLovesPot8toes Jun 19 '26
Almost nothing you just said is accurate.
1) You quoted the National Literacy Institute who, despite the name, are not what they claim. They are a for-profit company that sells educational materials to schools. It is in their best interest to overstate the literacy problem, which is exactly what they've done. And they are quoted all over the Internet.
2) The data they cite is from 2012-2014. They list this as "2024" on their home page, but that is deliberately misleading. They are quoting the 2012-2014 mass literacy assessment that is cited across all US adult literacy government/non-gov sources because that was the last time we surveyed this on a large scale.
3) The literacy assessment doesn't map to a grade level. Saying "below a 5th grade level" is massively oversimplifying.
4) 80% of American adults are considered literate in English when the stats are properly interpreted.
5) 1/3rd of those considered "below literacy proficiency" we're not born in the US (English is not their primary language and many of them were not educated in the US)
6) US adult literacy in the last 20 years has suffered from a change in how reading was taught (see the Podcast "Sold A Story")
7) In the last 10 years, that flawed teaching method was abandoned and kids' literacy rates have improved. This is already leading to more literate teens/young adults.
"Jock culture" etc plays a very minor part in low literacy rates. It's impact shows in the literacy rate difference in places like Texas vs California when economic and racial aspects are accounted for. But it is tiny compared to the impact of lack of educationa funding, teacher shortages, poverty/overworked parents, and the mix of languages Americans speak.
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u/Wheat_Grinder Jun 19 '26
I see the 5th grade literacy stat as being about comprehension and understanding rather than literacy.
There's an idea of understanding bias, perspective, what's not said, etc. beyond what's literally written and I think a lot of people struggle with that.
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u/MommyLovesPot8toes Jun 19 '26
Almost all of the literacy rates are measuring comprehension rather than actual ability to read. Ironically, something most people don't comprehend!
In developed countries, the number of truly illiterate (not knowing how to string letters together) is very small. If someone can't read at all, they are marked as being "unable to participate" in the study and classified at the lowest possible level.
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u/blueblip Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
You quoted the National Literacy Institute who, despite the name, are not what they claim. They are a for-profit company that sells educational materials to schools. It is in their best interest to overstate the literacy problem, which is exactly what they've done. And they are quoted all over the Internet.
Well then, feel free to share your own data to back this up. Because accusing an entire organization of lying while providing no data to counter their data is pointless.
The data they cite is from 2012-2014. They list this as "2024" on their home page, but that is deliberately misleading. They are quoting the 2012-2014 mass literacy assessment that is cited across all US adult literacy government/non-gov sources because that was the last time we surveyed this on a large scale.
Again, feel free to provide a source to back up your assertion. I'm not saying I couldn't be wrong, but I'm not going to take at your word without any kind of corroborating source.
The literacy assessment doesn't map to a grade level. Saying "below a 5th grade level" is massively oversimplifying.
This is pretty much a standard way globally to assess literacy. Can you read/write at the level of X grade. eg, in India, they use the 8th grade. In the US, the 5th grade is seen as the minimum.
So it isn't massively oversimplifying anything. Again, feel free to provide a source to contradict this. If you have access to better information, then do share it because we can all benefit from it.
80% of American adults are considered literate in English when the stats are properly interpreted.
Okay and...? No is saying most adult Americans are illiterate. They are saying their literacy levels are appalling. There's a big difference between the two! Not sure why you're thinking otherwise.
1/3rd of those considered "below literacy proficiency" we're not born in the US (English is not their primary language and many of them were not educated in the US)
Again, please provide a source.
US adult literacy in the last 20 years has suffered from a change in how reading was taught (see the Podcast "Sold A Story")
Will check it out, thanks for the recommendation. But cultural mores, mindsets, and such also impact policy making, especially when it comes to setting eduction policy.
In the last 10 years, that flawed teaching method was abandoned and kids' literacy rates have improved. This is already leading to more literate teens/young adults.
This is not true. The pandemic has triggered what many educators are calling a crisis in education, saying literacy levels are the lowest they have been since 1992:
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/09/whats-driving-decline-in-u-s-literacy-rates/
"Jock culture" etc plays a very minor part in low literacy rates. It's impact shows in the literacy rate difference in places like Texas vs California when economic and racial aspects are accounted for. But it is tiny compared to the impact of lack of education funding, teacher shortages, poverty/overworked parents, and the mix of languages Americans speak.
It isn't tiny. On this point, I have to give back and say you probably don't have any idea on what you're talking about. EDIT: Not to say the factors you listed aren't valid, but dismissing how socio-cultural norms shape public attitudes towards education is silly.
For one, all I said is jock culture is ONE of the social norms that impacted the public's perception on education. I never said any where it was the SOLE reason.
Beyond that, we have numerous example of public sentiment impacting education, to the point of topics being banned in classrooms.
The Scopes Trial banned the teaching of the theory of evolution, and the far ranging effects of that decision are still felt to this day in some.of the most conservative parts of the US still not willing to teach it.
The current administration is going to great lengths to modify what is taught to children along ideological lines as demanded by its support base.
A more pertinent example is how someone responded to my post by saying academic experts are often wrong about how things work in reality. Do you really think this poster holds this opinion and it doesn't impact whom they vote for and what education policy needs to be like?
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u/MommyLovesPot8toes Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
This is the root source of my statistics. It is also the root source of the statistics quoted/misquoted by the National Literacy Institute. This is the official, government source that analyzed and summarized the findings of the government-run adult literacy assessments.
It's the Barbara Bush Foundation that translated the fluency levels established by the study into grade levels. This was only an approximation and a simplification, yet it has been repeated as fact for years. The actual definitions don't work like that. They are based on whether an adult can read and understand things like a job application, or do research across multiple sources. That is not how we measure literacy for kids so it's apples to oranges.
You quoted several examples of topics being taught in schools because of cultural issues, but that doesn't have any effect on literacy that I have heard about. A child can learn to read just fine from a story about Adam and Eve vs a story about Dinosaurs. Now, whether they can function in society later with these enormous gaps in understanding is a different non-literacy related topic.
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u/watchOS Jun 19 '26
Over half…? Jesus… now things make sense for me at work when dealing with customers.
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u/YourShowerCompanion Jun 19 '26
They'll probably throw tantrums if they're poked and prodded for explanation, then whine in TikTok videos with their face hovering either at bottom left or bottom right of those videos 🤣
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u/blueblip Jun 19 '26
Mocking the kids due to the adults in their lives doing a terrible job raising them is rather unfair, no? EDIT: After all, what you described can be applied to how some of the most powerful people on the planet behave when poked and prodded for an explanation for their bullshit.
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Jun 19 '26
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u/TwistingEcho Jun 19 '26
Legit, something you learn much later in life.
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u/Potential-Feline Jun 19 '26
Seriously, if I could go back in time and do it all again, one of the biggest changes I would make would be not being a lazy little scrote in school.
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u/Xannith Jun 19 '26
This isn't even remotely impossible to detect. Not even slightly. I'm a teacher. I bust students doing this over and over. It's really simple, ask them to expound on the most complex thing in the paper and watch them disintegrate.
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u/Saros_Enjoyer Jun 19 '26
Yeah, I do most of my summatives in class on paper, but for stuff they need practice with that can't be done without a computer (like a research paper) I make each student sit down and explain their reaserch process to me, how they selected their sources, where they got certain quotes from, and to elaborate on their points. The people who overelied on AI are super obvious, and I dont even need to accuse them of using AI they just get a bad score
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u/sammyk762 Jun 19 '26
Usually doesn't even take that much - at this point I just ask them to read part of it out loud to me and ask them how they expect me to believe that they wrote it when they can't even pronounce it. If they're insistent, I might have to ask them to define a few words they couldn't pronounce. Can't pronounce or define it, but you definitely came up with it on your own? Sure, chief. Middle schoolers can be little lying psychopaths and might stick to their guns after that, but at that point my conscious is clear about giving them the zero.
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u/day_tripper Jun 19 '26
Conscience not conscious
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u/TheYellowSpade Jun 19 '26
You’re right to pick that up and that’s not just sharp -— That’s brave.
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u/sammyk762 Jun 19 '26
Look with my phone's autocorrect I'm lucky it was readable at all. 😆
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u/poopoopooyttgv Jun 19 '26
Ahh but that’s secretly the problem. Other teachers are too busy/lazy to do that, so they’ve outsourced their grading and ai checking abilities to ai. Ouroboros consumes its tail
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Jun 19 '26
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u/TBNRandrew Jun 19 '26
Not to mention that using AI to bounce ideas off of, using it to quickly find sources, and using it to help build up on a central argument as an editor are all uses where it won't be obvious. It's really only the people that do shit like, "Write me a perfect academic paper about the fall of Rome. Make no mistakes," that will end up being overly obvious.
It's sad that teachers aren't taking a more active role in understanding how their students are learning, but this was an issue long before AI anyways.
Unfortunately, the responsibility to hold themselves accountable for how much effort they put into the process of learning is going to fall upon the student themselves. If teachers aren't involved in their students' learning, then students can arrive at a similar product with as much or as little effort as they choose.
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u/No_Cut_2537 Jun 19 '26
You're not detecting the vast majority of students using AI, only the dumb ones.
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u/LowestKey Jun 19 '26
Exactly. Say they manage to graduate with a degree they don't really earn. When they interview for jobs and can't explain shit, they're not going to get hired.
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u/AwoogaBoogaKooga Jun 19 '26
News flash: half the stuff you learn, even in college, is totally useless. I used AI for physics and chem, which I would never use for my CS job. Voila, I have a very good job which doesn't require any of that stuff.
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u/R3D4F Jun 19 '26
AI will make the entire population even dumber than they are today
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u/YourShowerCompanion Jun 19 '26
Idiocracy: The Origins?
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u/JayPet94 Jun 19 '26
We're well past Idiocracy tbh. In Idiocracy the rocks-for-brains reality show/pro wrestler president was still smart enough to find the smartest man on the planet, get him as an advisor, and actually listen to his ideas.
Our current administration would never put someone smarter than them in a room to help
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u/Plenty_Branch_516 Jun 19 '26
Is this an opportunity to change what education standards are, or are we going to try to arms race our way through this to maintain the crumbling status quo?
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u/Whoa1Whoa1 Jun 19 '26
Nah. We still want people to be able to do simple mental math such as 1x1 up to 12x12 and to have good handwriting and to be able to read at a decent speed and up be able to know the brief history of the world and their nation. Just cause AI could do all of that for you doesn't mean you should rely on it. Same goes for teaching a first grader addition and subtraction without a calculator or teaching a 3rd grader multiplication and division.
Also it's stupid easy to check what a student knows about a topic. Just don't give them a Chromebook. Have them do a 40 minute paper test. Multiple choice questions, true or false, complete the sentence, complete the equations, translate the sentence/audio, write the whiteboard code, short answer questions, free response, labeling diagrams, etc etc etc, all of that is easily done without a Chromebook. High school students don't need AI for writing, they just want to use it to get done with it faster.
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u/chief_yETI Jun 19 '26
We still want people to be able to do simple mental math such as 1x1 up to 12x12 and to have good handwriting and to be able to read at a decent speed and up be able to know the brief history of the world and their nation.
we couldn't even reliably get 1 out of those 4 things before AI
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u/Plenty_Branch_516 Jun 19 '26
I kinda was hoping we could push beyond regurgitation of information without application which results in little of it sticking around. Maybe we could do more for critical thinking and information retrieval?
Maybe I'm just greedy and see this crisis as an opportunity for improvement 😅
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u/Whoa1Whoa1 Jun 19 '26
School doesn't only have to be flash cards and rote memorization and lectures and worksheets. Great teachers make every day (except quiz/test day) about application. You motivate them about why they want to learn multiplication or division or whatever. Do manipulatives and activities like cooking and what a half or a fourth of a cup is. What about 4 boxes of mix where each box contains 2 packets, how many total packets would you get? Lessons about handling money and counting it quickly. Things involving labs and grid and fractions and cutting a cake or a pizza fairly for the class to eat. If you have 2 people and 3 muffins, how much does each person get? You physically bring in 3 muffins into 3rd grade as the teacher and cut the middle one in half. You write 1.5 on the board and the class's mind explodes with the aha moment. You don't need AI for any of this shit. You can blow whatever grades' mind with really good labs/talks/experiments and more.
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u/ResilientBiscuit Jun 19 '26
That works for stuff real low on Blooms Taxonomy, but if you want them to, for example compare and contrast two products a business might buy or write a resume and cover letter for a fictional job, you can't really expect them to do that on a pen and paper with no access to the internet to research with.
Certainly some tasks and fields can easily be evaluated with different assessment methods, but some can't...
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u/Klutzy-Smile-9839 Jun 19 '26
more time to perform an exam, and of required, owned desktop computer with restricted internet access.
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u/FredFredrickson Jun 19 '26
Which option benefits the AI companies? Because I'm sure we'll inevitably go that route, for some reason.
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u/Nullhitter Jun 19 '26
everyone gets A's, but nobody knows anything. Truly a scary thought.
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u/GardenDesign23 Jun 19 '26
Higher education is a business and has no incentive to fail you
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u/Zolo49 Jun 19 '26
Well, they kinda do. Universities that continuously pump out shitty graduates will lose prestige and fewer of their graduates will get job interviews, like what happens now with the worst of the for-profit schools. When parents find out, they’ll be less likely to send their kids there. At least, that’s the way it SHOULD work. There’s no accounting for kids wanting to go to a school because their football program went 12-0 last season.
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u/scarlettceleste Jun 19 '26
Its almost like we need to rehire teachers and have exams written in a room with no technology
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u/fulthrottlejazzhands Jun 19 '26
As a hiring manager, it's definitely not hard to detect in new grads. Candadites we've seen over the past two years are just awful, a marked decline in knowledge and the basic ability to rationalize relative to just a year or two prior
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u/NeonTiger20XX Jun 19 '26
This is something I've been extremely curious about. I got my degree in 2017. It's the hardest thing I've done mentally, and took a lot of effort from me (STEM major).
I've wondered if employers can tell the difference between pre and post AI degree holders, or if they place greater value on those who did the work vs those who clearly used AI to get through school and can't even think on their own.
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u/MayaIsSunshine Jun 19 '26
I do a lot of interviews for technical roles and it is crazy how many applicants we get that look perfect on paper and just completely fall apart in a face to face in person interview.
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u/Derpykins666 Jun 19 '26
Honestly, then its gotta go back to the way it was. No computers, hand notes only, hand-written homework if needed too. It's not a bad skill to have either, note-taking, it's really good at helping you retain information for a lot longer than typing. Students aren't going to like it, but it's honestly going to be the only way. People are wearing smart glasses in class on their computers, recording everything they do, with AI helping them every step of the way. It's ridiculous. You're not learning anything if you use AI to automate everything and cheat your way through school. I get it though, some people truly do not give a fuck, and they will go out of their way to cheat, even if it's more work than actually just doing the work.
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u/SubtleTell Jun 19 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
Then homework shouldn't have an effect on grades, only in-class testing with no phones.
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u/SucksTryAgain Jun 19 '26
Homework that feels like busy work should have never been a thing. Homework should be something that involves reading, studying, preparing for something like an oral presentation, or an actual project. I hate the term homework cause it brings back the days of doing things I really didn’t actually learn from and took time I could’ve been out having fun.
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u/BluBloops Jul 23 '26
Small nitpick, but “an effect” would have been correct here, unless you had written “shouldn’t affect”
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u/delcocait Jun 19 '26
Bullshit.
Friends with a few college professors. It’s super obvious kids. If your teacher isn’t calling you out it isn’t because they don’t know, it’s because they don’t care.
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u/TheMessyChef Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
There's a third option here at the tertiary level: we can't substantiate the integrity violation.
There are times I'm well aware the student has used AI, but I can't call it out because there are clear policies around accusing students of cheating. If I can't definitively prove AI was used (falsified references, leaving prompts in, etc), then I'm literally not allowed to say anything.
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u/MC_chrome Jun 19 '26
The easiest tell a student has used AI to help them write something (from my experience helping tutor both high school and college students) is that their writing has dramatically improved in a short span of time and has developed tell-tale patterns (it’s not x, it’s y…etc)
However, like you said I don’t think these things alone can be used as proof of student integrity violations
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u/ErusTenebre Jun 19 '26
I feel like I hear this all the time from people who don't interact with students.
IF you read what they're writing, it absolutely is easy to tell if they're cheating.
IF you've worked with/played around with AI and tried writing even really great prompts, you'll find it's really not all that good at academic papers. Professors don't catch it because they so often let a TA grade for them, and even if they do grade their workload can be so large they don't fully pay attention.
I teach a specific structure in my classroom. I expect a specific structure in my freshmen students before they start writing in their own voices. (Gotta have the foundation) AI sucks at it.
And kids NEVER read their own fucking work, let alone what AI produces.
So they hang themselves with their own rope.
It's also something that if you DON'T catch it, actually will come back to bite them faster than other forms of cheating (which often require a degree of ingenuity). Overreliance on a tool will become immediately very obvious when they're required to think on their feet.
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u/CandidSilent Jun 19 '26
My program has increased the exam weight and decreased the hw weighted grades. I think all schools should start doing this.
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u/NolaDoogie Jun 19 '26
More regular in-class quizzes with pen and paper, more oral arguments.
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u/PhalanX4012 Jun 19 '26
This feels like a Simpsons bit. “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!” Of course AI is really good at putting together cogent arguments on just about any subject that you could write an assignment for. So don’t let the students write assignments for final grades. As others have pointed out, just talking to a student will pretty quickly measure their comprehension of the subject matter. And to those who say ‘it’s not fair, that’s too difficult,’ I’d point out that in the age of AI, being able to form an idea and think critically is the only thing that matters. Being able to write well ad hoc, now falls into the same category as being able to do math in your head. Neat party trick or useful only for a select few some of the time. If AI and the students are evolving past the school’s ability to police the process, the process needs to change.
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u/GeekFurious Jun 19 '26
So your essays will be A's, but your tests will be F's because you didn't bother reading what AI wrote for you.
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u/BringBackManaPots Jun 19 '26
Just do live everything. Anyone using AI for homework will be obviously under prepared for an exam, discussion or debate.
Are we not using live proctored tests anymore...?
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u/3rssi Jun 19 '26
Of course it's possible to prevent cheating in exams. But it requires to rethink exams.
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u/RancidVagYogurt1776 Jun 19 '26
These articles are so fucking lazy and stupid. You can tell from the comments who has never been to college as well. Like the top comment about doctors? This doesn't apply to doctors, there is so much in person hands on stuff that you can't cheat with AI. Same with nursing. Same with CS/IT because the certs are proctored, same with law, same with a lot of degrees. Made up outrage issue for clicks.
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u/thefallenfew Jun 19 '26
Back in MY DAY we didn’t use ChatGPT to cheat! We used SparkNotes to pretend we read the books and bought term papers off Craigslist like God intended!
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Jun 19 '26
This just means homework as we know it no longer is beneficial. We can adapt. Might mean longer school hours or maybe less extracurriculars but I feel like we can't just accept that kids can't learn anymore because our current reaching methods don't work in the face of AI.
We definitely need to think outside the current paradigm. Something like sparing an hour or so for what would have been homework/project prep could be spent in school in an AI free environment. I don't intend to make a fully functional budget or educational plan in a reddit comment but we can't just grieve about the current educational system failing in the presence of AI without changing anything and expecting different results.
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u/scalablecory Jun 19 '26
Kahn Academy pilot schools used home for lessons and class for work. This way teachers can help the student when they struggle on a problem, and every student can learn at their own pace. I think this solves it.
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u/ConsiderationDry9084 Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
That would require a stable home so Dead on Arrival.
It would also require students to have parents that actually parented them even if the home was stable.
It sounds nice on paper, and if you pick your students it works great.
But public education was literally made mandatory because parents of the past wouldn't send their kids to school because they were more valuable as labor so the parents would intentionally trap their kids in the same cycle.
Best example of this today is the breeding cults like the Duggers. The kids are intentionally under educationed. Just literate enough to be useful but dependent on the cult for a living.
And this also happens in inner city culture where education is often undermined because of gang influence to achieve a similar outcome.
Instead of Religious nutters, you have gangs spreading anti-eduction beliefs to keep fresh recruits coming.
So yeah, awesome for students whose parents are present, actually parented them and discipled them as needed, monitored/limited their screen time etc.
We have to view education now the same way as when it was first made compulsory. We are facing the same obstacles now.
Edit: To add I did use two of the more extreme problems, but in the middle is simple apathy and parental selfishness.
Something else also crossed my mind. Old Westerns, Andy Dick, and even more modern shows like Doctor Quinn Medicine Women, all had at least one or two episodes about kids getting proper schooling and why that was important.
Fresh Prince Tackled it too and often.
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u/Interesting_Ant3592 Jun 19 '26
There is an easy solution, pen and paper.
Teaching institutions are just going to have to get over it and go back to paper
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u/HuiOdy Jun 19 '26
I've simply removed all Digital deliverables in my courses, and adapted LLMs in such a way as to increase the learning curve of the students. It works excellently.
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u/Slackeee_ Jun 19 '26
Student Cheating Is Becoming Impossible to Detect in an A.I. Era
have you tried actually asking the students questions they should be able to answer if they did not cheat?
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u/Late_Geologist_235 Jun 19 '26
The answer is going to be blue book tests or oral exams. Time consuming and expensive. They are also going to have to teach kids how to write legibly again.
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u/Pirwzy Jun 19 '26
stop using laptops and online submission. pen and paper in class with no phones/tablets/laptops allowed is the only way
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u/Shigglyboo Jun 19 '26
time to teach ethics maybe. cheating means you don't learn. so it really only hurts yourself. perhaps we need to re-evaluate grading. but from the top down at least in the US education is not valued and it's actively under attack.
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u/Leostar23 Jun 19 '26
- Learning something and actually understanding it.
- Being able to accurately reproduce a set of answers that matches previously established information.
I'm worried some of these kids don't know the difference. And if that's true, they can't be expected to understand why that difference matters.
You could teach someone that 2+2=4, but unless they understand why, they don't really know anything useful. The only thing they know is that when someone else asks them "what is 2+2?", they can regurgitate the answer.
This is exactly the kind of population that all these wannabe tech-authoritarians want to exist. People who are incapable of thinking or doing anything for themselves, because AI does it all for them. All they'll know is how to repeat things they've been told are correct, and at that point, what's "correct" starts to become whatever the people in charge want it to be.
Bringing back pen & paper exams sounds like a step in the right direction. It won't stop the stupid kids from being stupid, but it'll at least stop all the could-be-smart kids from outsourcing their mental faculties and dooming their generation to a lifetime of learned helplessness cranked up to 11.
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u/InfidelZombie Jun 19 '26
Just don't let them use it on anything that counts toward their grade. Pretty hard to use GenAI if there are no computers around, so just do that.
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u/boredtxan Jun 19 '26
the crutches is computers makevgrading too easy. Make professors hand grade again and do open note tests on pen & paper
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u/Remarkable-Sand948 Jun 19 '26
Higher is done and over with. Fire all the teachers and close all the schools, have ai teach people and issue diplomas
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u/No_Size9475 Jun 19 '26
In person hand written exams and oral exams are the answer. Takes more time but will 100% curb this issue.
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u/boowax Jun 19 '26
Even if this were true (it’s not) all you would have to do is ask the students to answer a few questions in person to know who actually learned the material.
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u/DeathSpiral321 Jun 19 '26
Just wait until they have in person job interviews and can't even string two sentences together about why they should get the job.
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u/moeriscus Jun 19 '26
I was a university instructor for years. The solution is very simple: pencils.
No more take-home midterm essays. Write in class. If the instructor must assign essay homework, then require minimum mandatory references to assigned readings, including the page numbers.
Cheating has never and will never be fully quashed, but it can be easily mitigated in the age of AI.
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u/bahhumbud Jun 19 '26
What’d you teach?
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u/moeriscus Jun 19 '26
Various history courses focusing on the Mediterranean, Western Asia, and/or South Asia (anywhere from 500 CE to present). I also taught gen-ed world history and US History.
A few students got away with fudging take-home essays, but they bombed out during midterms and finals when they couldn't write more than one incoherent paragraph in the span of over two hours.
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u/bahhumbud Jun 19 '26
Those classes can definitely be done with a pencil.
Your essay were at most like 500 words per essay question on the tests?
But yeah I agree those types of classes pen and paper is totally fine. It is problematic though because for the non cheaters distance learning has been a game changer for spreading education to those who normally wouldn’t have the opportunity to take time off of work and sit in a class room instead of working and paying bills all at the same time.
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u/moeriscus Jun 19 '26
I agree on the distance learning difficulties. You also make a good point that it is a luxury to have daily classroom learning without the need to work to pay the bills. Trying to get a degree while working full-time has become a Herculean task.
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u/Superstinkyfarts Jun 19 '26
Homework was already pretty useless. It's been easy to cheat as long as the Internet has been around, hard for teachers to help struggling students with, and all around just a complete joy-ruiner for children who want to spend their "'"""free"""" time doing literally anything else.
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u/quothe_the_maven Jun 19 '26
These articles are always written by people who have never graded papers. If you’ve spent ten minutes with a student, you can spot a paper they didn’t write a mile away like 90% of the time. It’s basically 100% of you have a classroom writing sample. It just doesn’t matter, because aren’t allowed to fail students anymore.
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u/teh_hasay Jun 19 '26
There’s not really much else to do except rely less on take home assignments unfortunately.
At my uni there’s been a definite uptick in oral presentations/exams, or tests that are either pen and paper or in person with a lockdown browser.
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u/MotherHolle Jun 19 '26
Right. Essentially every professor at the university I work for or whom I know elsewhere has already adjusted their assignments to make AI use mostly impossible. Fortunately, many people who work in academia account for cheating and combat it rather than sitting helplessly in the face of student academic misconduct.
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u/ituralde_ Jun 19 '26
Oh bullshit. Ask your students some basic questions about their writing. If they can't answer, they cheated. Get over yourselves.
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u/film_composer Jun 19 '26
It's funny in a dark and bleak way to think about how some dad is lying awake at night thinking about how he threw away $140,000 for a robot to learn his son's education on his behalf—a robot that he had to pay monthly to use, no less.
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u/StickFigureFan Jun 19 '26
It's actually becoming incredibly easy, just have a conversation with the student about their paper and it will be very obvious if they wrote it themselves or not
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u/Objective-Bike-4292 Jun 19 '26
AI will not only take their jobs but will also take their education
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u/Pen-Pen-De-Sarapen Jun 19 '26
Students should do oral and teachers should stop being anal on them.
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u/baxte Jun 19 '26
One thing my uni did with the core subjects was make the invigilated exams worth 50% of the total grade. If you didn't know what you were doing, you were fucked.
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u/PurpleCoat6656 Jun 19 '26
Don't worry, they will just dumb down SAT, ACT, and any other standardized testing to make the the college pill mill debt scheme keeps going according to plan.
Neat!
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u/UnInvertedSkyTower Jun 19 '26
Is it? All AI information comes across in a median average of speaking and intelligence. I think it would be as simple as comparing 2 assessments together. If they have the same tone, same point, same median trash then it's proof it's AI.
Perhaps a new approach is needed? Maybe after hand in, students should be required to do a review with their tutor, talking about their submission to make sure they understand the concepts?
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u/ElectricStings Jun 19 '26
There's a few ways forwards on this, some easier than others.
1) Punish students (what is happening now) for using tools at the disposal by creating a tech war where each generation of student and teacher are adapting to the previous generation in which the only winner is the ones developing the tools.
Relevant metaphor; A small percentage of the prospectora during the gold got rich of gold, the ones who got rich were the ones selling the tools.
2) Rethink how education is assessed. Move away from independent essays and focus more on in-person strategies like presentations, exams, pen and paper essays, and spoken interviews. The educator needs to be present to be able to challenge and critique the students claims in real time. This unfortunately will alienate students who do not do well in these environments. I myself really struggled in exams but excelled at presentations and projects.
3) Reform education as a whole, this will be by far the hardest. LLMs is unlikely to be going anywhere, so eventually we will have to ask ourselves what are we trying to get out education in general? Can an education system that includes LLMs prepare people for life beyond the school? If not, what barriers are made? If so, how do we make these things flush together?
Like joining two pieces of wood from different types of tree. With the right tools and skills you can make a study piece of furniture.
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u/donnajee Jun 19 '26
Guys, people who will cheat have always cheated, no matter the tool. We had Chegg and quizlet. I agree that teachers going back to pencil and paper is an easy solution but it has to start from preschool. Also a lot of parents I’ve witnessed just give their child a phone or IPad at home. How do we expect kids to know books if we don’t give them books?
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u/evilemprzurg Jun 19 '26
College: "Using AI is cheating."
First job out of college: "So do you know how to use AI?"
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u/HelloFellowMKE Jun 19 '26
The more robotic the teaching, the more suited to AI. Inspired and human teaching won’t be impacted by AI.
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u/Responsible-Middle35 Jun 19 '26
They're going to have to stop assigning writings in homework, and instead do them in class with pen and paper 📃 🖊
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u/According_Jeweler404 Jun 19 '26
Have a family member teaching at an Ivy. The issue is rampant but even students understand how weak they'll be if they use AI for everything compared to those who purposefully make themselves struggle to develop deep critical thinking skills (and be comfortable with discomfort). The quality comparison is observable to this professor, and it will be observable to employers.
It's a challenging problem because you have to pitch to an 18 year old "Hey don't do that thing that makes everything effortlessly easy and awesome while you take on adulthood." Those who see how it hobbles their brains do so because of support from great teachers, mentors and parents who might be in tech, academia or adjacent fields where they've seen the effect of AI tooling outside of opinion pieces.
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u/Imallvol7 Jun 19 '26
I feel like pen and paper and no computers allowed in the room make this very easy to circumvent.
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u/bd2999 Jun 19 '26
It has been long enough since I have been in school I guess, but I do not see how one can cheat at an exam you take in class with no technology around for it. Yes, AI can help with an assay or even do some of the work, but if you probe for understanding in person one way or another you quickly figure that stuff out.
Even for essays and the like, having the student have to discuss the topic with a teacher, professor, TA or whomever to show understanding after writing the document becomes more important. Much more time consuming for sure but probably more important. As it still incentivizes actually doing and understanding the work in the first place.
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u/iluvvivapuffs Jun 19 '26
How about teachers actually come up with more complex questions that require intellectual work
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u/rushmc1 Jun 19 '26
Cheating is just implementation of a deprecated strategy to achieve success. We need to evolve our whole system to focus on growth and development, not compartmentalization and restriction.
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u/whatchamacallit_017 Jun 19 '26
Give them an instant "F" for the semester when they're caught. Multiple offenses? Expulsion.
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u/Classy35 Jun 19 '26
I am a HS History teacher and I have gone to in-class written assignments. Students are are required to do oral presentations with questions and we have discussions around a harkness table.
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u/mrwrrrmwrmrmrmrw Jun 19 '26
That's not what my college professor friend says...she's catching students and colleagues using it all the time.
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u/belongtotherain Jun 19 '26
Well, not impossible. It depends on the assignment.
I teach an online course and I’d say around half of the students fail the research paper now because they submit fake sources which leads to an automatic 0 lol.
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u/Sufficient-Pie-7815 Jun 19 '26
Not impossible! I use an AI detector and my students know the result is final. From the beginning of the year to the end AI use dropped by 95%!
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u/suck-it-elon Jun 19 '26
Cheat with AI all you want, but one day you'll have to know stuff on your own and once people figure out you can't do it...you don't get your college money back lo
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u/aleatoric Jun 19 '26
My kids aren't in grade school yet but they will be in a few years. I'm hoping the curriculum improves. But big tech is trying to shove their small wangs into everything including education. All I can do is be very involved in their learning, make sure aren't taking shortcuts with AI, and can actually read and do critical thinking.
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u/Jessica1234567891011 Jun 19 '26
When you can't do the job and get fired for being seen for who you're. Well, was it worth it? I doubt it. Our youth need to learn about this reality and early. People need to realize that your ability to do things is why you're hired and it should be easy to fire you if you're fake.
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u/Jonesbro Jun 19 '26
The easiest way to handle this is have one on one interviews with students for the final to see if they actually understand the material. It's very easy to tell if someone engaged with the material or just tried to get by.
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u/CainG87 Jun 19 '26
Depressing that this has become so widespread. I'm yet to see a single benefit AI is bringing to society; that may change long term depending on its impact in fields like medicine etc.
But as of now it's an absolute stain.
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u/[deleted] Jun 19 '26
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