Students Hate Them. Universities Need Them. The Only Real Solution to the A.I. Cheating Crisis.

Rebecca Levere: Some sobering advice from the Vice Provost at NYU responsible for helping faculty and students adapt to digital tools. A couple of passages that stood out to me:

“Our A.I. strategy had assumed that encouraging engaged uses of A.I. — telling students they could use software like ChatGPT to generate practice tests to quiz themselves, explore new ideas or solicit feedback — would persuade students to forgo the lazy uses. It did not.

We cannot simply redesign our assignments to prevent lazy A.I. use. (We’ve tried.) If you ask students to use A.I. but critique what it spits out, they can generate the critique with A.I. If you give them A.I. tutors trained only to guide them, they can still use tools that just supply the answers. And detectors are too prone to false accusations of cheating and too poor at catching lightly edited output for professors to rely on them.”

(And tldr: The ‘hated but only real solution’ to the AI cheating crisis: have students write or speak in front of you, without tech.)