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Is there a new cheating epidemic?
Some major game titles are now unplayable in the higher rankings because of cheating: CounterStrike, Call of Duty, Tarkov. This occurs to a comical degree
High school teachers say most essays are now written with AI
Cheating with AI in school is trivially solvable on an object level. It’s just that the bureaucracy and or faculty don’t want to.
Whether that’s due to laziness, head in sand, politics, profit, or some sense of “inequity”, or any other misaligned incentive is up for debate.
I assume the inequity part is a decent amount of it. If you start actually forcing measurable accountability, it will take away other subjective safety nets.
This will effect pass rates and almost certainly have some disparate impact.
But the point is that anybody with even a little bit of intelligence could think up a plan to counter AI cheating for any given course or learning objective.
Mass AI cheating would fix the achievement gap and make it so the students who have fallen behind don't look like they have fallen behind. Ubiquitous AI cheating is potentially a massive gift for schools and universities. I guess with universities there is a risk it might destroy the reputation of the university. but this is a problem someone else will have to deal with in 5 years time. The current administrators are free to set fire to the schools reputation and enjoy all the rewards that come with it.
As someone involved with teaching college students, it's even more simple than this: Teaching (and marking even moreso) is a nuisance appreciated by no-one (least of all the students, who often just want their piece of paper and be done with it) at this point, so you just go through the motions of doing the absolute minimum. For one class I work together with literally the most popular professor, who has won multiple student-led prizes for teaching at our university. His assignments and exams? "I have done the same for a decade now, why change anything?" His policy for passing students? "I would pass them during the oral exam anyway, so why should I make myself the work by not letting them pass the written exam?" He is a really nice guy, his classes aren't bad and he is always helpful when you ask him for anything, so I have nothing against him; But if that is the mindset of the best, woe upon the rest!
I once had a professor who knew psychometrics so well, including its history but many ways as well that statistics could be used within methodology, and why, and when, and which types were preferable and which types to avoid and which types revealed nothing, that he seemed eerily erudite. He taught us the ins and outs of SPSS and Winsteps (R was just coming in) and we were eventually doing structural equation modeling. The last of his classes I took was my introduction to Bayesian reasoning. He really was brilliant and made me want to rise to his expectations.
But as a teacher pedagogically he was pretty bad. I didn't really understand his grading. He'd answer questions in such a way that I would become even more lost. But I was probably a better student in his doctoral class than I had been in the entirety of my (years earlier) time as an undergraduate.
I don't envy those whose job it is to evaluate teachers. I suppose a pre post assessment of student ability (at whatever), averaged across a large enough population, might be one way. Just looking at post scores or student evaluations wouldn't be enough.
Of course a school's PR team might likely be more concerned with shiny markers such as popularity with students. That certainly doesn't threaten the school's funding.
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