There are a lot of people who are concerned about the future integrity of the educational system because of the rise of generative AI tools. After all, if students are able to get assistance with math, writing, and coding from a single free service such as ChatGPT, what is stopping them from utilizing it to cheat on every assignment? In a question and answer session issued by the institution, scholars from Stanford address the issue.
According to the findings of Victor Lee and Denise Pope, education scholars at Stanford, student cheating has very little to do with the technology that students have access to, including artificial intelligence.
“There’s been a ton of media coverage about AI making it easier and more likely for students to cheat,” according to Pope. “But we haven’t seen that bear out in our data so far.”
60–70 percent of students have reported engaging in at least one “cheating” conduct over the previous month, according to Pope. This indicates that high cheating rates have been a problem for educational systems for a long time, even before ChatGPT and other comparable artificial intelligence technologies hit the scene.
This figure has remained the same or even fallen somewhat in 2023 polls, according to Pope, despite the fact that questions have been included that expressly address ChatGPT and the ease with which students can access the technology.
The researchers report that students are often honest because the surveys are anonymous and do not explicitly ask, “Do you cheat?” but rather ask particular questions that are classed as cheating. This is done in order to address the concern that individuals may have regarding the students’ ability to answer those surveys honestly.
“The most prudent thing to say right now is that the data suggest, perhaps to the surprise of many people, that AI is not increasing the frequency of cheating,” according to Lee.
However, the question that needs to be answered is: What exactly motivates pupils to cheat? Pope highlighted a number of different causes, including the fact that they were having difficulty with the content, that they were unable to acquire the assistance that they required, that they had an excessive amount of homework but not enough time to complete it, and that they were feeling overwhelmed by the pressure to accomplish.
“We know from our research that cheating is generally a symptom of a deeper, systemic problem,” according to Pope.
When the researchers were advising school officials on how to continue, they recommended educators to include artificial intelligence (AI) in the classroom in ways that make the technology helpful to kids without compromising ethics. This was done taking into consideration the fact that AI is not going away anytime soon.
I like to conceive of artificial intelligence literacy as being comparable to driver’s education. As Lee put it, “We have a powerful tool that has the potential to be a great asset, but it also has the potential to be dangerous.” “We want students to learn how to use it responsibly.”
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