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Secondary education

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DD cheating with essays with AI

58 replies

Meandmyfeelings · 27/11/2023 15:38

I have realised that my year 9 daughter is using AI to write her essays. I’m sure this must be a fairly common problem but how do I stop this? She is a very wilful child who we battle with homework with anyway. She needs a laptop for work. How are schools coping with this? She said the teachers are not noticing. Ultimately it’s her that will come unstuck at exam times. Any advice please

OP posts:
MrsHamlet · 28/11/2023 17:38

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.

Quickredfox · 28/11/2023 18:33

MrsHamlet · 28/11/2023 11:25

Turnitin now has an AI detector.

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

MrsHamlet · 28/11/2023 18:58

Quickredfox · 28/11/2023 18:33

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

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

GnomeDePlume · 29/11/2023 10:48

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?

LolaSmiles · 29/11/2023 10:59

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".

CatatonicLadybug · 30/11/2023 10:33

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!

caringcarer · 30/11/2023 11:06

GreigeO · 28/11/2023 00:44

schools using scanning software to catch kids out

that’s not true

Many schools do especially on coursework.

Katy231 · 30/11/2023 11:22

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.

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