I love the ingenuity of students when it comes to avoiding work. I remember a student showing me how playing 3 French YouTube videos in different tabs simultaneously somehow fooled the Rosetta Stone language learning software to think he was responding to oral tests correctly. How on earth did he figure that out?
Here’s a video of a kid who, while doing an online math quiz for homework, figured out that if you go to the web browser’s developer ‘inspect element’ tool you can find out the correct answer. Just hover over the code of the multiple choice questions and it highlights the choices and the code tells you if that choice is true or false.
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If there is an easy way to solve things, students will figure it out.
There isn’t an AI detector that can figure out with full certainty that someone cheated using a tool like Chat GPT. And if you find one, it probably would not detect it if the student also used an AI paraphrasing tool to rework the final product. It would be harder again if their prompt said something like, ‘Use grammar, sentence structure, and word choice that a Grade 10 student would use’.
So AI will be used for assignments. Students will go into the inspector code of a web page and find the right answers, and it’s probably already the case that shy students have trained an AI tool to speak with their voice so that they could submit oral (and even video) work without actually having to read anything aloud.
These tools are getting better and better, and thus much harder to detect.
I think tricks and tools like this invite educators to be more creative about what they do in class. We are seeing some of this already, but we are also seeing a lot of backwards sliding: School districts blocking AI tools, teachers giving tests on computers that are blocked from accessing the internet, and even teachers making students, who are used to working with computers, write paper tests.
Meanwhile other teachers are embracing the changes. Wes Fryer created AI Guidelines for students to tell them how to use these tools appropriately for school work. That seems far more enabling than locking tools down and blocking them. Besides, I think that if students are going to use these tools outside of school anyway, we should focus on teaching them appropriate use rather than creating a learning environment that is nothing like the real world.
All that said, if you send home online math quizzes, some students will find an easy way to avoid doing the work. If you have students write essays at home and aren’t actively having them revise that work in class, some will use AI. Basically, some students will cheat the system, and themselves of the learning experience, if they are given the opportunity to do so.
The difference is that innovative, creative teachers will use these tools to enhance learning, and they will be in position to learn along with students how to embrace these tools openly, rather than kids sneakily using them to avoid work, or to lessen the work they need to do… either way, kids are going to use these tools.
Choice and empowerment are definitely key, and I agree they may make a good litmus test when it comes to the value of counseling and therapy. But on the subject of “choice,” I find it interesting that we place so much societal faith in it. There’s lots of examples of this. The overwhelming number of soft drink choices in a convenience store, the drink choices at Starbucks, the number of potato chip options in the grocery store. I think at some point, choice can become overwhelming. As Society, it’s valuable to question the inherent and unlimited value we put on choice. Perhaps “All things in moderation?”
Very insightful Wes, I agree about choice and have a lot I’m trying to internally articulate about ‘creative constraints’ and limiting choice when it comes to projects and assignments for students and ourselves… before I share more externally. However, when I think of the need for therapy and healing, I think most people do not suffer from too much choice, but rather a lack of choice. For example, only feeling the pain of loss, or only seeing the same unhealthy patterns that need repeating… without other choices being possible or other choices not feeling viable/workable.
I’m sure there are people that just feel overwhelmed with too much choice but if I were to think of the most ‘stuck’ people I know, I’d say lack of (perceived) choice would be their greatest limiting factor.