The solution to students using AI to cheat is not going back to handwritten essays and speeches. The first thing we must do is increase funding, so we can reimagine colleges and universities.
AI in the classroom: Cheating, learning and the new academic gray zone
AI tools are popular at work, but what about college? Students and schools grapple with ethical concerns.
In recent weeks, a plethora of news and opinion articles have warned that college students are cheating en masse by using artificial intelligence to write their papers, and that higher education is overall in peril. While the details of these arguments vary, many of the articles and the people who comment on them seem to converge on the same solution: Let’s return to the Old Days of essays and declamations, when students wrote in blue books and took oral exams.
As a writing scholar, I’d like to encourage us all to take a deep breath. Alarms about the illiteracy of American youth and the end of writing as we know it are as old as writing itself, and resurface every time a new tool emerges.
Pencils with erasers? The death of writing. Spell check? The death of writing. Word processors? The death of writing.
We’ve been worried about writing skills for decades
In the United States, alarm about writing skills has been on a regular cycle of what writing scholar Susan Miller ironically called “nostalgia for the recently lost excellence of student discourse.” Remember the “Johnny Can’t Write” Newsweek cover in the 1970s? That wasn’t the first American literacy crisis by any means. In the late 1800s, journalist and editor-in-chief of the New York Evening Post, E.L. Godkin, made numerous alarming claims about the “illiteracy of American boys.” He was especially concerned about all the “evil influences” on their poor writing, which included street slang, the bad writing in newspapers, and popular novels (“the better the novel, the more evil the influence,” he claimed).
We tend to imagine a previous golden age of writing where Johnny could read and write perfectly and in plain English. But that golden age never existed.
Our current challenge is not a new one. Students are what they have always been: learners. And writing continues to be what it has always been: hard. There is no going back to a golden moment when everyone wrote eloquently and students never cheated. Thus, the solution is not to embrace blue book essays, as so many columns advise.
For one thing, our classes are too big. If we really want students writing by hand and giving speeches with feedback and assessment by expert faculty, the first thing we must do is fund public higher education again with tax dollars (we clearly can’t raise tuition any further). That does not seem to be the direction that this country is moving. (For a good account of where free, publicly funded higher ed fell apart, take a look at Chris Newfield’s excellent book, “The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them.”)
At every school I know, including mine, administrators and the legislators who control our “state share of instruction” funds are requiring faculty to raise minimum course sizes and teach more classes − for less and less funding. Unless we change those teaching and funding conditions, there are simply not enough faculty and too many students in our classrooms for blue books and declamations to be a practical solution.
We also are not going back because handwritten essays and speeches were part of what college looked like in a very different world: the old liberal arts colleges of the early U.S. were for wealthy boys who would be preachers, lawyers, and gentleman scholars. The specialized workforce of today did not exist, nor did the many specialized work genres of today. If we go backward and assign handwritten essays and speeches, we might avoid cheating, but we are not preparing students for today’s world of work.
Writing is how we get things done in the world
Writing in its many forms is how we get things done in the world (writing scholars say it “mediates activity”). But writing is not simply a final, polished product; it is also a means of learning. Through the act of writing, we come to understand our ideas and audiences in new ways. AI is a tool (or rather, AI presents writers with many tools), but writers need to understand how and why to use them (and when not to).
The role of education at this moment is to create broadly literate students. Graduates need AI and technology literacy (among many other kinds of literacy) to understand how things work and why they work that way, and what the consequences are of inventing and adopting new tools (like AI). Providing this kind of education requires rethinking higher education altogether. Educators must face our current moment by teaching the students in front of us and designing learning environments that meet the times.
Students are not cheating because of AI. When they are cheating, it is because of the many ways that education is no longer working as it should. But students using AI to cheat have perhaps hastened a reckoning that has been a long time coming for higher ed.
Widespread cheating to get good grades, as one recent article alleges, is happening, and is the logical consequence of turning college into a factory that churns out workers. State legislators create policies that pressure colleges and universities to create more and more technical degrees with the sole goal of having majors that align with job titles.
State funding models reward schools for producing graduates who have a high salary the first year out (as is the case in Ohio, for example, thanks to recent policy and legislation). These practices have led us all to where we are today. Yes, graduates should be able to get jobs, but the jobs of the future are going to belong to well-rounded critical thinkers who can innovate and solve hard problems. Every column I read by tech CEOs says this very thing, yet state funding policies continue to reward colleges for being technical job factories.
College, teaching needs to be different
College needs to be different. Teaching needs to be different.
I spend a lot of time helping faculty reimagine curricula and learning environments. Their sense of urgency for engaging in that work has certainly increased over the past two years. As one example, the center I direct at Miami University has been piloting an AI-informed Pedagogy Program to help faculty members explore what AI is, consider the ethical implications of using and developing it (including on climate and intellectual property), name their principles for using it, and then consider how to integrate it into their courses with clear policies and scaffolding.
Faculty are eager to engage in this program. Colleges and universities need more of this kind of faculty development, but the necessary transformation of higher education at scale is going to take much more. Our cultural assumptions and legislative policies for funding higher education must also change. Practice follows policy and reward structures.
Like roads and libraries, education is a public good. An educated population makes us all better. As a country, we need to decide if we want to fund that public good. And consider what sort of public good we need future graduates to provide. What do we want college graduates to be able to do and contribute to the world? How will our country support this vision?
The days when school was about regurgitating to prove we memorized something are over. Information is readily available; we don’t need to be able to memorize it. However, we do need to be able to assess it, think critically about it, and apply it. The education of tomorrow is about application and innovation. Those of us who study teaching, learning, and writing can chart a new path forward.
For that to become a reality, however, higher education must be supported and funded to make something new.
Elizabeth Wardle has served as the Roger and Joyce Howe Distinguished Professor of Written Communication and the Director of the Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University in Oxford since 2016. She is the author of the book “Writing Rediscovered: Nine Concepts to Transform Your Relationship With Writing.”
