Another week, another series of AI-related misconduct cases. In the past I had to deal with academic misconduct on, at its most common, a monthly basis; more commonly though it happened barely twice a year. At those times, I would treat it with the utmost severity, talking of the stigma of cheating, leaving those evildoers long not knowing whether their devious acts had led them to be expelled in order to leave a traumatic imprint on their psyches that would leave them incapable of contemplating using subterfuge to pass an assessment ever again, before discussing their redemption.
Now, AI-related cheating is prevalent to the point that it's hard to even meet with them each infringing student, nor with enough time to really even energise myself up to any kind of theatrics about it. We are almost at the point of mass-producing study agreements to have them acknowledge their deeds, put boilerplate terms and conditions, before releasing them back into the wild to cheat, probably in a better way, next time. In the international education, which I can speak about, it is rife.
I have started pathologising it to a degree with AI use and then dependence being akin to a problem gambler. The victim starts to use AI tools to be able to present better than they really can do without them, but then cannot stop using them for fear of failure, even if capable, or showing their real ability, if not; then, as time goes by, they are expected to do be able to do higher level things. But at some stage, the deficit between their capability and the demand of the tasks is so great that in no world could they actually do it without assistance. Cheating now is a bit like the moment where the victim has to break the rules to sustain the habit like stealing from the tills, whether they want to or not. (A similar thing has happened in chess, where with the development of "chess engines" that can analyse any position in milliseconds, there are notable cases where players have been caught misusing technology. While it might be possible that they were caught their first time ever cheating, more it wasn't, the only way to "keep rating points" was to keep cheating.)
Two weeks ago, I had a minor victory in persuading a past/future cheater to acknowledge their real ability and negotiate them into their proper class. He had entered a high-level Academic English class with a strong entry test, gone through Orientation and did a strong grammar and vocabulary test but his writing diagnostic was clearly AI, and was flagged by their teacher. He was spoken to by the programme leader but despite requiring translation to understand her he could not be talked out of remaining in class. Then he was spotted with AI glasses, the first case of them being noted in our student body, and I was asked to speak to him. What I learned shocked me. His family had been in New Zealand since 2020, which would have been about when he was 15, and despite a few classes, he did not have an interest in learning English. He would have seemed to have bounced between China and Auckland. His main enjoyment here was to go to Hampton Downs for the car racing but otherwise would have preferred to enjoy his China life. But the family decided he should start proper study and he qualified for this high-level course despite not having any foundation English. His reason for refusing initially was not because of his own preferences, but because his family would not accept it.
Anyway, in our meeting, I started by speaking to him in English, very slowly, to see how low he actually was. It did not take long for him to request to wear his glasses, which I declined. After cutting off his recourse to technology, he could understand some basic things, functionally an Elementary user. I let him know I could speak Chinese and we switched. I said that there was no way he would be able to pass the programme, even with re-enrolment, because it did not give him the foundational skill that would be required. I said I imagined that sitting in a four-hour English language class five times a week must be really hard when you cannot understand anything. I let him know that I had experiences like that in my language learning. He said it was really difficult, but his family would not let him leave this course. I had said the school could help out with that - as he had clearly cheated on the tests, we could withdraw him from the course if they did not withdraw him. He asked to speak to his family and the agent, and despite initially wanting me to speak to his agent, the notification that he was changing to general English came within a few hours without any further involvement from me.
To be honest, though, he might have only came of age a few years too early. There is a compelling argument that language learning might be unnecessary in the near future with assistive technologies. Could we have students with only ability in their mother tongue going to any country and receive education their with wearable translation technologies? And could they respond to assessments in their own language with it translated for submission for marking?
Some people analogise the rise of generative AI as similar to the advent of the calculator into school life. It was a part of my lived experience that we had to learn times-tables (which is presumably still the case for kids now), long division (which is probably not), and then schools widely introduced calculators as a particular age, and at the time it was feared that they would "make our children dumb". In the laboratory of real world life, it would appear that the prevalence of the calculator has had huge utility, and the loss of mastery of some aspects of maths has not really happened, or has not become too apparent. To be clear, the teaching of mathematics was rarely done particularly well, and it was never a a majority of students who learned, mastered and internalised the principles of mathematics so they could be retained. But using a calculator well did provide all people with immediate understanding of numbers.
The loss of status around handwriting is probably similar. While it is still taught in school, the mastery of a keyboard is even more important these days. There is more recognition that some will struggle with handwriting for reasons not due to their intellect or discipline. The key question is whether something is lost in the replacement of these legacy skills and I would say that it is always a balance.
Times-tables, for example, might have been memorised as a song or phrase ("Two times two is four"), or as a visual representation (just remembering how it looked "6x7=42"), rather than anything remotely involving associating it with computing numbers. But those are all skills. And then when you have more complicated numbers you deploy these particular memorised facts to figure out 13x17, by doing 10x17=170, and adding 3x17=30+21=51, and thus 221, and hoping to do that in your head, which itself is a skill of memory. In a truly post times-tables world, the repetition of this kind of technique would not happen, most likely someone who had to do that off the cuff would succumb to the temptation to use technology. Or even if they could, not trust that the 221 they had in their head was necessarily correct.
If you could count how many hours a year were spent during my university years searching for words in bilingual dictionaries, quite possible the operative unit might have reached days. Those days' worth of flicking could have used for other productive uses, but I would also presume it gave me something. For vocabulary, it always gave me similar words, the requirement to distinguish similar characters in different languages. It innately gave me knowledge that words in one language to the next were not 100% conceptual copies, and that reading and comparing were required. I might have had a strong visual memory beforehand, but on the foundation of those, in my 40s, I can have a working understanding of the Persian, Hindi and Cyrillic scripts, and also memorise the diacritical markers of Vietnamese without rote learning.
Handwriting is an interesting one because I was poor at that in primary school, but I recall being obsessed with kanji (Japanese versions of Chinese characters) in my teens and would repeatedly write them. I might not have hit that mythical 10,000 hours of mastery, but the hour count would have been high. As a result, learning Chinese was much easier at university, and even today I can still have the ability and fine digital motor skills to write them. And writing Persian now, though not even similar, is not difficult.
What is being lost and how much is gained is a key question. Or whether doing times-tables in your head, handwriting, speaking a foreign language will be akin to knitting or carpentry. I mused a couple of years ago that authorship and creative works might have "organic certification", that is, a label to say the prose or the ideas were strictly from a living, breathing, unaugmented mind. But it would run into the same issues of organic produce today: To have an author slowly writing their own prose, producing a work every year at best, could never be economic and be increasingly expensive; completely generated works or AI-augmented works would be able to be mass produced. Organic works would have its spots, and wouldn't always taste the same as the last one. The AI-enhanced works would be consistently "good". The self-authored work would be expensive, and possibly this would give room for fraudsters to use technology in a sneaky way and claim their works were genuine 100% human made.
