Welcome to the Teachers Need Teachers Podcasts, the podcast for teachers who don't want
to just survive teaching, but actually thrive. It has been a while since
I last posted because I got sick, And what's kind of interesting is that
I posted my last episode about how to prepare for substitute days, and then
I got sick and I used all that information because I was out for a
while. So if you haven't checked out that episode, be sure to do
that. And I'm really excited about today's episode because I've been reading a lot
of information lately about students cheating with AI, and I definitely wanted to address
it. Even though it's only banned about a year. Since chat GPT was
unveiled to the public, AI has permeated pretty much every aspect of our lives.
It has been useful in so many different ways than people could have even
dreamed of, but it's also become quite a headache in the education space.
It seems like people are on either side of the fence when it comes to
AI. They're all in and super excited about using it and their teaching in
their classrooms, or they're assembling teams to try to find out ways to battle
this technology in education. I absolutely love AI and specifically things like chat GPT,
but I do acknowledge that students aren't using it effectively and are frankly being
pretty lazy about it. They're just asking AI to write their assignments for them
and just pass it off as their own, which ill So in this episode,
I'm discussing five hacks that will make it harder for your students to cheat
in the age of AI. Stay until the end because I have a bonus
tip that's going to work for a lot of you, and you don't want
to miss out. The first step to making your assignments more cheap proof is
to get a baseline of your student's work. I would suggest that you do
some kind of paper and pencil assignment to make sure that it's authentic, and
I would make it really low stakes. In fact, I wouldn't even grade
this initial assignment. You would be more along the lines of show me what
your teacher taught you last year, show me what you know in my particular
subject, and just make it so that the students don't necessarily feel compelled to
cheat in any way and they don't freeze, and they'll actually show you what
it is that they can do. You could even make it a group assignment
if that makes it easier for the students, But I would suggest giving them
some easier material, something that they should have already learned by the time that
they've got to you, and then have them work through that and write out
their answers, whether it's math or science or any subject, just basically what
is it that they're coming to you with and so that they can give you
authentic work. And if you teach a subject where students are going to have
to site sources or anything like that, go ahead and ask them to do
that as well. Now, one of the reasons why I like to do
this is because the different programs that use AI, like chat, GPT or
Bard, they have their own voice. They have a particular syntax and cadence
that after a while of using them, you kind of get used to the
way that it sounds. So having a baseline of how they actually write or
how they actually work their thought process, you can compare something that they in
that maybe doesn't seem like it's really there, You can compare it to the
baseline, and that can be further proof that they probably cheated on it.
It's actually pretty interesting to see how each AI functions. For example, what
chat GPT, when you ask them a question, they will repeat the question
in the introductory sentence, and then they'll give you the answer, and then
they'll have a conclusion, and a lot of times Google Bard, they like
to give you things in bullet points, and they also kind of summarize what
you just said, and they don't necessarily provide you with as much of a
conclusion, but just the way, it's kind of like having a conversation with
different people, you can just kind of tell, or even like if you
text someone, you can tell just by the way that they text who they
are. So next, you're definitely going to have to tweak some of your
assignments and create more specifications and requirements. So this is really important because the
AI isn't capable of fulfilling all of the requirements for your assignment, especially if
you're picky. So what this could look like is requiring a certain format for
your submission. For example, my PLC, we teach seventh grade English,
we require what we call the race paragraph format, and so race is R
for rey, A is answer, C is site, and E is explained.
Although it's more like racist is because I do cite and explain twice,
plus I require a summarizing sentence. So if a student goes into chat GPT
or Bard and asks it to write a race paragraph about a particular subject,
most of the time when those paragraphs come back, it's not in the proper
format. It doesn't fulfill my particular requirements. For example, when they cite
their evidence for me, they have to use direct quotes. Also for their
explanations, they need two sentences, and those sentences cannot paraphrase or summarize the
quotes. Sometimes I even require that they use certain transition words or certain phrases.
And so the more specific that you can be in terms of your requirements
in which you put on the rubric, the harder it is for them to
use AI to cheat. For math, you could do something that require that
they divide their work up into certain sections they number or label each step.
Maybe they have a more metacognitive area where they have to write out their thinking
process on that and it has to be like on a certain area of the
page. It just makes it a little bit harder for them to do copying
and pasting. And I would definitely deduct points from any deviation from your format,
so that students learn that they have to do it precisely and in this
way, and they're going to find that it's actually more work for them to
use AI to help them with the assignment than to just figure it out on
their own. It's gotten to the point where when I'm using AI to create
multiple choice quizzes, it can't even give me the exact format that I need
in order to import it into my learning management system, and so I still
have to go in and tweak some things. It's also given me incorrect multiple
choice answers when I've asked it about a particular story, and so you still
have to go back and check your work to make sure that the AI is
correct. And I've had even students submit assignments using AI. The quotes that
they use in there didn't even exist in the story, and so everyone pretty
much has to be careful when they're using it because AI isn't full proof.
Something that I would also consider is your revision, redo retake policy. Now
there's going to be a subset of kids who are going to cheat regardless of
what your policy is because they just don't want to do the work. They're
just lazy, they don't want to do the work. But at the same
time, they don't want to be hassled by their parents because they have an
F in your class, So they're going to use AI to cheat. But
then there's also those students who because they want to go to a higher level
college or university and grades really matter for them because of that, they are
cheating so that they don't get a bad grade in your class. And so
sometimes if you have a really strict policy where you don't allow revisions or any
kind of retakes, you're more likely to get students who are going to cheat.
The next thing that you can do that will definitely forward any attempts to
just copy and paste from AI is to require and proof. So what this
would look like for a writing assignment is you would require sources and citations for
the assignments. And I know it doesn't apply to every situation, but if
you can make it apply to writing assignments specifically, you're going to find that
students are going to be less likely to cheat if you do this. So
one thing that you could do is create a minimum number of citations, say
five to ten per assignment, and then I would ask students for screenshots of
the sources. So let's say that they had to read a nonfiction article and
then they had to do some kind of write up about it, and they
would have to include a quote from the article. What I would want them
to do is not only quote it, but also screenshot it. That way,
you know for sure that they know where that quote is in the article
and that they didn't just pull it from AI. And then if you do
allow them to paraphrase the evidence, they still need to include a screenshot of
the actual quote. And here's why I took a class for my own professional
development, and I decided that I was going to see if I could use
AI to help me with my assignments and what that would look like and what
would happen, because honestly, I was just curious, not that I needed
the help because I am an English teacher, but I just wanted to see
what it could do. I have to tell you that in many ways,
it kind of sucked. So something that I tried doing was copying a chapter
from the textbook and pasting it into the AI and then asking it to pull
quotes to support a certain claim. Something that I like to do is the
double check and find where that quote is in the text. And I would
go back and I couldn't find that quote in the text. I would do
a control F and search specific words in the quote that it gave me,
and it didn't exist. So then I thought, well, maybe just paraphrase
it for me. So then I still had to dig through the chapter to
find that particular quote that it was pulling from, and it was just the
same amount of work as if I had just done it myself. If anything,
it took longer. I've also found that sometimes the AI just makes up
things. So if you're asking students to give you the original quote, if
you're asking them to give you the original citation, then they are less likely
to cheat because it doesn't do them any good. It's easier if they just
go and find the quote themselves, rather than having chat GPT you write it
out for them and then have to go back and find where it lines up
with the quote. I also asked various AI programs to give me a list
of studies that I needed for a research paper. So I just wanted to
see if you could give me websites or scientific studies so that I wouldn't have
to look it up myself. But here's what I did. I took the
ten studies that it gave me, and I actually search for those. And
I'm a fairly good googler, So if I don't find something on the first
try, I know how to tweak it so that I can really find what
it is that I'm looking for. And I would say that only about half
of those sources actually existed. It's like it made up these articles or journals
or studies. I don't know what it was, but I couldn't find at
least half of them. So then I had to still go to like Google
scholar and find our goals on my own. But it's not necessarily the most
reliable thing. So if you have something like that where the students have to
prove to you that something exists, or that they have to prove where they
found something, it's going to be a lot harder for them to cheat.
So then I mentioned for writing assignments that they would have to cite sources,
but this also works for something like science. So if they're doing elaborator,
there's a good chance that you're having them apply something that they learned in the
textbook. So what you could do is require them to cite sources from the
textbook or cite information from the textbook to back up their claims. What this
could look like in math is asking them to show their work and again to
be really metacognitive in terms of putting out their thought process of Okay, why
did I do that next step? Why did I do that other stuff?
And also properly labeling it. You could also incentivize them not cheating by allowing
them to get full points if they do test corrections or if they go back
and fix certain answers, but they have to explain where their faulty thinking was,
and then they could still get full points, or at least they could
earn back some of the points that they lost. If students are struggling in
your class and they're doing poorly on the homework, and then they can go
back and fix it by just telling you what it is that they got wrong,
then they're less likely to cheat because you're letting them take risks and you're
encouraging that learning process for them. You know, in extreme cases of cheating
and math, something else that you could consider doing, which could seem like
a little more work, is to do an oral exam, So you could
give kids the types of questions that you're going to ask them ahead of time,
let's say like ten to twenty questions, and then on the day of
their oral exam they pull out a question from a JAR and that's someone that
they're going to have to work out in front of you and again be metacognitive
and think out loud, and their whole exam grade just kind of rides on
that one question. I mean, even if you gave them the questions ahead
of time, if they use AI to help them with that, they're not
really going to do so well in person on that exam. You can figure
out who needs reteaching or some remediation, and then you can help them catch
up later on. Now this next part will be a little bit controversial,
but you can kind of take the wind out of your student sales by actually
requiring them to use AI. I mean, if you can't beat them,
join them. And what's great about this is that you can actually show them
the limitations of AI so that they are less likely to depend on it.
So, for example, you could do a before and after assignment, so
students have to write out their assignment. Let's say in class paper and pencil.
You give them a prompt and they just have to write it out and
then they have to go in and type that into the AI and ask for
feedback. All the programs will give them feedback on their writing, and then
they have to revise their writing based on that feedback. And I would add
the additional step of having them highlight what it is that they fix. So
if they fix sentence structure or grammar or whatever it is that they fix that
chat GPT told them to do, they have to actually highlight that. So
again, yes they could copy and paste it being rewritten in AI, but
they have to take that extra step of going through it anyway to highlight where
it was fixed. And of course I would ask for screenshots of all of
the steps to prove that they actually started out on their own, they went
to chat GPT, they read the feedback, and they revised it. Another
fun assignment, maybe if you teach science or social studies is to have them
ask AI for information. Maybe you can give them certain questions that they're going
to ask the AI, and then they have to fact check the answers that
they get. That could really turn it into a great conversation because they'll see
that AI is wrong a lot of times, and like I did with that
one class that I was taking, you can have them ask the AI for
ten sources for a research paper, just ten sources for something in general,
and then they could go and look up those sources and decide, Okay,
would those actually be something that I would use in my assignment or does it
even exist in math? You could give them a concept that they have never
learned before and have them ask chat GPT or Bart or any other AI to
teach it to them, and then you could give them a quiz later on
to see just how well the AI taught it to them, and then you
could have a discussion about that, like how did it teach you how to
solve this? What types of examples did it give you so that you could
learn this concept? And then you could also then just teach a regular lesson.
But it's a really good learning experience for them to see what the AI
can and cannot do and that it's definitely not a replacement for you as a
teacher or for them, and they're thinking as a student to come up with
these types of assignments where they have to use AI, I would think,
like a student in your class, what would compel them to cheat, but
would compel them to use the AI in your class and then actually have them
do that. So again, if I have a race paragraph, I would
have my students ask the AI to write a race paragraph about a certain topic
and then have a discussion with each other about just how good or bad that
race paragraph. Adding these requirements where they do have to use the AI,
they're still learning along the way. They're learning during the process so that they
can see what it is not only that the AI can do, but also
they are validating the information that's coming out, and they're still absorbing the concept
or whatever it is that you want them to learn in that process. I
mean, I have to tell you I've used it, like I said,
for multiple choice questions and things like that, a lot of the answers were
wrong, and you might be telling me that my prompt isn't good or that
I'm using it incorrectly. But if I'm using it incorrectly and I like to
use AI, you can just imagine how your students are using it. And
finally, I think it would be time well spent if you had an honest
conversation with your students about how AI is it going to replace them or they're
thinking Now, you want to make sure that you have this conversation from more
of a sympathetic place. I mean, people have been cheating on assignments for
ever. They've just gotten more sophisticated in their methods. I mean I remember
kids sitting outside of their lockers copying each other's work, or hiding in the
bathroom copying each other's work. And then when they had cell phone cameras,
they were taking pictures and sending it to each other, or they were taking
screenshots on their iPads. I mean, the kids have just gotten really savvy
in terms of how they cheat. But just remember they've always cheated, So
we don't want this to be a lecture about how they shouldn't cheat or use
AI to cheat. That's not the point. And then you're just going to
tune you out if you come at it from that angle. You need to
know that students are willing to die on this hill in terms of using AI
as a tool, and no matter how much you try to fight it,
if they want to use it, they're going to use it. So let's
try to come at it from a different way. Let's communicate to them that
the students still need to learn the material and it's really important for them,
especially if they're going to have a conversation with their peers in class about this.
If they didn't learn the material, frankly, they're going to look dumb.
I mean, they know what it's like to be in a group and
not know the material. They didn't do the work, and they're just sitting
there while everyone else is frustrated with them. If they rely on the AI
to always do their homework for them or their assignments, they're not going to
learn. AI can't build a better body for us in a gym anymore then
it can build our brains. So our brains should be doing the heavy lifting
and not the AI. The AI should absolutely be a tool that we could
all use. The way that I like to use AI honestly is to use
it as a launching point to give me ideas, to help me get unstuck,
to help me phrase something when it's coming out pretty ugly and clunky,
and so I put down that ugly, clunky sentence and it just kind of
cleans it up for me. I feel like students should want their authentic voices
to be heard, and that what they present to you as a student should
be the best that they have. It should be this is the best that
I can do. Take it or leave it. I'm willing to improve it
and make it better if you help me. But this is really what I
know. I just feel like as students, as they're getting older, they
have their right and the responsibility to make sure that we know who they are
and that we know what they're capable of doing, and not try to hide
behind a robot something along those lines when you're having this conversation with your students.
Because I've told my students how much I do like AI. I've written
articles for them to analyze and rate and answer questions and annotate with the help
of AI, and I'm really open about it. And so I think if
you come from more of a hey, this is a really cool tool,
and I think you can help them see how using it to cheat is not
going to help them in the long run. Now, as promised, my
bonus tip is to use a lockdown browser. Now, your school or district
will probably have to purchase this, but this is something that is being used
by California and when it gives its standardized testing every year, and basically it
locks down the student's device, whether it's an iPad or if it's a tablet,
or if it's a computer, it locks it down so that they can't
go to any other tab or window or app or program or anything. It
literally locks them into that exam. So if you have a lot of cheating
when it comes to online exams and kids are using AI or just using study
guides or whatever, then purchasing a lockdown browser is really going to help curb
that. Now, if you haven't played with AI yet but you want to,
and you don't know where to start, then I would definitely suggest checking
out episode one ten or I do give you some prompts and also show you
how to better craft your prompts when you're asking AI to do things for you.
And so go ahead and check that out so that you can kind of
start to play with it and get an understanding of how it works. Thanks
for hanging out today with me, and I will see you next time.