ChatGPT essay cheats are a menace to us all

• Published date: 15 April 2024
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

The number of students using AI tools like ChatGPT to write their papers was a much bigger problem than the public was being told, this person said

AI cheating at their institution was now so rife that large numbers of students had been expelled for academic misconduct — to the point that some courses had lost most of a year’s intake. “I’ve heard similar figures from a few universities,” the academic told me.

Spotting suspicious essays could be easy, because when students were asked why they had included certain terms or data sources not mentioned on the course, they were baffled. “They have clearly never even heard of some of the terms that turn up in their essays.”

But detection is only half the battle. Getting administrators to address the problem can be fraught, especially when the cheaters are international students who pay higher fees than locals. Because universities rely heavily on those fees, some administrators take a dim view of efforts to expose the problem. Or as this person put it, “whistleblowing is career-threatening”.

Underqualified

There is more at stake here than the injustice of cheats getting an advantage over honest students. Consider the prospect of allegedly expert graduates heading out into the world and being recruited into organisations, be it a health service or a military, where they are put into positions for which they are underqualified.

So how widespread is the cheating problem?

Panic about ChatGPT transforming educational landscapes took off as soon as the tool was launched in November 2022 and since then, the technology has only advanced. As I type these words, colleagues at the Financial Times have reported that OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, and Meta are set to release souped-up AI models capable of reasoning and planning. But AI’s exact impact on classrooms is unclear.

In the US, Stanford University researchers said last year that cheating rates did not appear to have been affected by AI. Up to 70 per cent of high school students have long confessed to some form of cheating and nearly a year after ChatGPT’s arrival that proportion had not changed.

At universities, research shows half of students are regular generative AI users – not necessarily to cheat – but only about 12 per cent use it daily.

When it comes...