DD cheating with essays with AI

I'm not sure how old people are on these threads but haven't school/unit students always plagiarised or done something similar.

What we did before AI:

• copied and pasted from online essays
• used word synonyms to alter the text
• used a plagiarism checker and altered any text that was flagged up.

This isn't a new thing. We just took a longer route to do the exact same thing chatgp does. Every kid in class probably does it and some are just better at making it out like they have written it.

You still do learn as you link it all together anyway so, it's fine.

Many schools do especially on coursework.

I was a Head of English in the days before AI was in the picture, but cheating on coursework still existed and the same sort of consequences exist for using AI as paying someone to write your essay or buying answers online or getting your parents to write it or just copying something you’ve found. I’ve had all of those happen with GCSE coursework.

The student may get away with it for a while but not forever. It’s easy to fool one teacher here or there, but further into the course there will be moderation when more than one teacher is looking at the student’s work. If one person queries it (and this is likely, as some people are easily fooled by AI and others just aren’t!) then the work submitted will be compared to exercise books from classes, possibly multiple subjects. Either the quality will be very different, and the coursework will be disallowed, or the quality will be similar and then it’s daft that the student even tried to cheat. Those students are still usually caught out in the end because something will give it away (usually that the cheat answer doesn’t jive with something the teacher specifically pushed in class).

Once a student is caught, if it is for coursework, there’s a whole series of knock on actions. We would then inform all subjects in the school of this incident and bring all the coursework from all subjects into question. In fact we had one HOD in Humanities who had a blanket policy of disallowing all coursework if you were caught cheating in another subject, and the student would have to come in before/after school and complete an entire folder of new coursework in her classroom so they could be monitored.

I’ve also had to inform exam boards of known persistent plagiarists so their folders across multiple subjects could be moderated by staff outside the school.

I didn’t teach in a fancy school (in fact the opposite, quite a rough comprehensive) so it’s not just schools with an excellent reputation that can be quite serious about this. Could a student get lucky and their school doesn’t do much? Sure. But it’s a lot to risk. I remember a student getting caught quite late in the game and when all the other y11s were off doing fun stuff, he was spending all his hours in the school, redoing everything in hopes he would pass at all. He was moved from higher to foundation papers so couldn’t achieve his predicted grades and had to change his A Level plans. He was barred from the leavers’ prom. It can all be an absolute mess. I think he cheated more and more because he got away with it once and started to feel invincible, so he did less and less actual study as the time passed.

I guess I would impress that there’s a domino effect to come, one line leading to all the trouble and having to rework everything or possibly being entirely withdrawn, and the second line leading to being completely unprepared in the exam when it’s just the student and a desk and no AI to help at all. The odds are just not in her favour!

I agree with you GnomeDePlume. It's a useful tool that can be used to support learning. If you use the right prompts and use it effectively, it can be like having a personal tutor to understand concepts.

I understand a year 9 student wanting to take a short cut on their homework. It's not going to help them long term though.

What I find weird is that post-16 and in HE it's a go to for lazy students who, for some reason, sign up to study courses but don't actually want to study or learn or put the effort in. Why sign up for a course if you're not interested in learning and studying? I don't see what's so brilliant about saying "I've done this course and isn't it great that I didn't do my own assignments".

AI can be used effectively if you know what you want and are prepared to put the work in.

The problems come for the lazy student who wants it to do all the work. Away from formal exams they may get away with it but if they get caught once formal assessments start, the consequences can be pretty severe and rightly so:

• exam failure
• exclusion by exam board

Plagiarism at uni can result in expulsion.

Anyway, who wants to be known as a lazy cheat?

Nope. My students are busily doing that for me. And thus jeopardising their A level results.

I know. Have you generated text yourself and scanned it? All my 100% ChatGTP text passes.

I was given a superficially very impressive essay to mark last week.

However, it failed to meet the assessment criteria and the quotations were all made up. I'd flagged it as malpractice before I looked the Turnitin AI detector flagged it.

My husband (lecturer) caught two students cheating by using Google translate into and out of two different languages - it dodged the plagiarism checker and produced authentically broken English of the type that might be produced by a non native speaker! He originally thought one had copied the other Ironically, the topic was efficiency and he had to admit they'd solved the problem of "I haven't done my work for tomorrow's deadline" efficiently...so good business sense but a fail on academic honesty.

Exactly this

I find a lot of people don't know how to use AI tools to get the best out of them

Most expect to be able to feed in a question and if it doesn't instantly produce an A grade piece of work then that means it's rubbish

Tell her that if she carries on cheating, you'll tell her teachers. Seriously. This kind of thing needs stamping down on, she needs to know you don't condone it. It will do her no good at all in the long term.

So easy to get through any ai checker if you use correct prompts.

I know someone who has just completed an entire diploma level 5 with chat gtp. Despite the uni’s many lectures that they can pick it up, they never picked up any of her work.
To get something that would meet the assessment criteria, cover the appropriate module/course content and get to the point of it being appropriately written, the person writing the prompts would need to know enough about the topic to write and rewrite decent prompts. It's not going to give them the depth of knowledge as actually learning material.

A lot depends on what the student wants to achieve. If they want to learn about a topic then there isn't a short cut to developing decent knowledge and skills. If they're looking for a quick way to tick some boxes and get a certificate then AI can do that.

Actually, there are lots of people that won’t come unstuck at assessment time because of this. Lots of bright kids can pick things up quickly and are still learning whilst using chat gtp. They are just skipping the laborious task of proving that they are learning to the teacher. Learning has been really adapted to slow learners over last 20 years. Read it and then copy it out, that’s pretty much learning now. Cleverer kids can actually just suck that info up on the first read.

AI is here to stay, and your daughter will be much better prepared for future work if she can use AI, learn how to use the right prompts, fact check the work and edit it to make it clearer. I know that's not a popular opinion.

It can be used in a positive way. I've used it at work to rework or rephrase something I've been stuck on. I sometimes have to write marketing waffle and this isn't my background so I sometimes use AI to help me get the tone right or rework something.

It's very easy to see how kids can fall into the trap of relying on this for essays. Perhaps you need to monitor her computer a bit more or tell the teachers you suspect she is using it?

When I was in high school / sixth form, I had to email in my essays and teachers wouldn't accept handwritten ones.

So easy to get through any ai checker if you use correct prompts.

I know someone who has just completed an entire diploma level 5 with chat gtp. Despite the uni’s many lectures that they can pick it up, they never picked up any of her work.

She'll come unstuck at assessment time, so just explain this to her. Failing to practice essay writing herself will means she fails her in school assessments. Even if she doesn't see the value of practicing now, she will sooner or later. It'll be very obvious to everyone what she's doing if she does well on homework, but bombs assessments. Her teachers probably do already know what she's doing. Use failure as a learning opportunity.

‘I teach university level and have run my essay questions through AI out of curiosity. None of the responses have ever been worth more than a C, the answers from AI are too vague and don't really answer the question properly, they're more of an information dump on the topic’

no, but you could ask for a bullet pointed suggested structure. And then for each suggested topic ask it to write a paragraph.

Then ask it to critique it’s own work and then rewrite it based on those critiques.

You might find that the grade you’d give improves with the improvement in prompts.

and all this will take literally about a minute and a half.

Ultimately it won’t do her much good. Essays at AL, and assignments at University level will show up pirated material, and the comeback will be swift and sharp.

Her teachers will know the difference between what she produces in lessons and what miraculously appears as homework anyway. I hope they have the decency to speak to her about it before she gets too far into the mindset of not trying because cheating is easier.

How can it detect that they're using AI? I thought it gives a different answer every time you ask the same question?
The giveaways are in the vocabulary used and the sentence structure.
I also find the big giveaway is that the question set hasn't been answered in a way that suggests familiarity with teaching materials too.

I think this is a very good point.

I work in a technology field and colleagues have been interested in looking at some of the coding possibilities. All have said that you need to understand the question you want it to answer as well as understanding what the answer should look like.

We had a memo from our school last week about this.

They have stated clearly that teachers can spot an essay generated by AI at 30 paces and any such work submitted will be marked 0 and a detention will be earned.

They have also pointed out that not doing the work now, during the course, almost certainly means a fail at GCSE. All pupils have had that fact explained to them bluntly.

I'd explain the risks to your DD, then let her get on with it. If her teachers are any good, they will react in the same way, and she'll get the message. And if she doesn't, I guess she'll be retaking in a couple of years time.

i wouldn’t go all hellfire-and-damnation. Most kids occasional veer off the path of ethical perfection when faced with a “final straw” grotty homework assignment at some stage - it’s similar to “can I just borrow your answers and copy” - you know you shouldn’t but it doesn’t feel like crime of the century.

So I would say to her, next time she’s tempted - write her own into and essay plan, THEN let AI have a go, then read the AI answer and put it aside and rewrite in her own words

Tell her at first it will be her and slow and she won’t feel her version is superior

but in time she’ll realise she is capable of better than the AI. And also she’ll learn where AI tools can or can’t help her be more effective

She will ultimately get a better quality output AND wean herself off the AI OR learn how to be so effective with AI tools that she can achieve better-than-human results - which after she passes her school exams is actually a skill she can use in real life.

Turnitin doesn't pick up the ai if they have run it through a secondary program like gramerly. And even without the secondary program turnitin is crap at detecting it. The one thing ai is currently really shit at is critical appraisal and referencing but I'm not sure how much of that they are expected to do it secondary school.

I say this as a lecturer in higher education where we suspect a huge amount of our students are using it and we are banging our heads up against a brick wall trying to figure out assessments avoiding it. All while higher education ( at least our uni) is still saying we should be doing online exams 🤦‍♀️

Also proving it becomes incredibly difficult the programs only give a % chance and have actually been shown to be biased against non native speakers so that's not ideal.

I teach university level and have run my essay questions through AI out of curiosity. None of the responses have ever been worth more than a C, the answers from AI are too vague and don't really answer the question properly, they're more of an information dump on the topic. What sort of marks is your daughter getting on her cheat essays?
I'm curious to know what schools are doing about this.