AI, Cheating, and the Illusion of Learning
I have noticed a troubling trend recently when my students cheat with AI.
At the beginning, my undergraduates used to simply cut and paste whatever the AI gave them. Then they learned to put that output through other AIs to “humanize” the writing. (Thanks Grammarly!) The tech-savvy students would create their own prompts (“write like a smart student who is rushed and makes occasional syntactical errors”); the paranoid ones would go through the essay and make lots of minor changes.
But now, a lot of my students have turned to what I call the “split screen” strategy: They’ll input the professor’s directions into AI (maybe on their phones or a second screen) and then retype what the AI tells them, making minor changes (sometimes every paragraph, sometimes every sentence) as they type.
From a detection perspective, it becomes almost impossible for even the best AI detectors to identify such writing as AI-generated. Moreover, going into the basic back-end analytics (whether in Google Docs or MS Word) shows you that, yep, the student did in fact take a bunch of time to write the document (since they spent the time typing it up). And student after student using this “split screen” strategy has initially proclaimed to me, “I wrote it myself!”
Technically, they’re right.
If I stepped into my students’ shoes and embraced some of the key principles in contemporary debates about the educative value of AI – cognitive scaffolding, legitimate peripheral participation, distributed cognition – I could see their point. Indeed, students have literally cried in front of me, swearing to me that these were their words, their thoughts, their truths; it just so happens the AI helped them say it better. “Jeffery,” an engineering major, said it best to me: the AI helped him to take what was poorly formed in the back of his head and make it clearly visible.
This, dear reader, is the illusion of learning.
Let me first address the detection issue, since every reader is probably screaming at me right now: the student cheated! So here’s the tell: If one uses a “process tracker” (I personally like Draftback), one can actually see – word by word – how someone types their essay. And whereas you or I write “recursively” – e.g., we make minor or major edits, retracing and rethinking and revising our thoughts and words – these students just type, word after word, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph. There are no errors, no revisions, no moments when they go back and redo a sentence or paragraph because it might not make sense.
For me, though, the more important question is about “intellectual autonomy”: did my students in fact write these essays themselves? Did AI truly help Jeffrey articulate the thoughts buried deep inside of him?
Unfortunately, the answer is no.
The proof is in the typing. The students’ fluid, flowing, frictionless typing reveals the heart of the matter: the lack of productive struggle. Genuine thinking does not occur without reflection, without a moment of doubt, without pausing and realizing that one may not know how to phrase something. John Dewey, in How We Think, poetically framed thinking as a “forked-road situation, a situation which is ambiguous, which presents a dilemma, which proposes alternatives.”
“As long as our activity glides smoothly along,” Dewey continues, “there is no call for reflection.”
What Jeffrey was doing was procedural mimicry, transposing words and sentences from one surface onto another. AI has, rightly enough, been called a “stochastic parrot.” Our students are turning into procedural parrots, simply and smoothly repeating the words being given to them on that split screen.
What I had to tell Jeffrey – and what I tell all my students at the start of every semester – is that naming that reflective pause (and not the eloquence of what is being typed) is the key to success in my course, for that is what real learning looks like. Jeffrey could (and should), in my opinion, use AI as he tries to figure out what he is actually thinking. But this requires using AI as a Socratic partner rather than as a ghost writer.
This, dear reader, is where we are in higher education: how do we help our students pause in their typing? How do we create pedagogies that foster productive struggle and honor those moments of doubt?
These are not new questions or recent concerns. Dewey’s conceptualizations from over 100 years ago should make clear that our educational systems have never been great at developing students’ critical thinking skills. The answer, therefore, is not some nostalgic return to blue books, which is just another version of academics trying to “save the phenomenon” of a broken system. Instead, we must help our students (and ourselves) reclaim the power of the struggle of learning.
