Of Course, Some Will Cheat
Before 2023, my teaching year followed a pretty predictable emotional rhythm. In September, I’d be excited, not only to meet my first-year writing students but also about the prep work. Lesson planning would take longer than expected, but I’d leave those sessions energized. I looked forward to conference week, where I could meet one-on-one with each student, and the first stack of papers. By October, I’d usually hit a slump, but by November, even my least enthusiastic students would show signs of progress. By the end of the term, I’d be back in love with my job, especially when students stayed behind to shake my hand or left me a thank-you note. The second semester was much the same: exhaustion would hit earlier, but the recovery felt even sweeter.
The strange thing about this cycle is that I’d forget it was a cycle. In October and March, I’d genuinely feel like this was the first time a group of students had let me down, and that I’d failed them just as badly. The slump felt fresh every time. Sure, last year I thought the same thing, but this time it felt different—at least until the reasons I thought were solid would slip my mind. Teaching has a way of giving you amnesia, like running a marathon—or so I hear. The only reason I know it’s a cycle is because my wife reminds me every year. She remembers last year’s reasons even if I don’t.
Since the 2022-23 school year, with the rise of ChatGPT-2 and -3, this cycle now includes a new element. After the semester ends and I’m feeling good about things, I’ll inevitably come across another exposé on college-level cheating with ChatGPT. These articles make me wonder if anyone actually learned anything. I find myself reading through the latest take, whether it’s an ambivalent, longer view from The New Yorker or a sensational account from New York Magazine. The latter starts with a story about a student named Chungin “Roy” Lee:
Lee, born in South Korea and raised outside Atlanta, doesn’t worry about academics or grades. “Most assignments in college are hackable by AI,” he says. His solution? He uses AI to breeze through school with minimal effort. When asked why he’d bother going to an Ivy League university only to outsource his learning to a robot, he replies, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”
“The best place to meet your co-founder and your wife?” Only those with privileged backgrounds expect life to be that predictable. Everyone else knows better. But if we pay attention, we’ll see that there are plenty of reasons not to panic or think things have drastically changed. Lee’s parents run a test-prep business, which already treats education like a set of mechanical steps while pretending to value actual learning. Longtime writing instructors know this well: if a student really wants to cheat, they can afford it. Even if you create assignments that align perfectly with your lessons, someone with resources can still pay for a fake paper. For the wealthy, cheating is often just a cost of doing business. Lee’s casual disregard for integrity is almost charming in its brazenness, as if he doesn’t even realize what he’s doing. When he’s caught running a business to help other students cheat through remote interviews, he seems surprised that Columbia would punish him for innovating with AI—especially when the university has a partnership with ChatGPT’s parent company. There’s hope for Lee yet, though not for Columbia, whose leadership lacks the insight Lee has.
But Lee isn’t my main concern—my real panic sets in when I think of a student like Wendy (a pseudonym).
When I ask Wendy to show me the paper she turned in, I find that it’s about critical pedagogy, a philosophy of education by Paulo Freire. The paper argues that schooling hinders students’ ability to think critically. But her opening line is, “To what extent is schooling hindering students’ cognitive ability to think critically?” Later, when I ask Wendy if she recognizes the irony of using AI to write an essay about critical pedagogy, she doesn’t seem to get the point.
What’s most troubling about this—what really bothers me—is that if this were a first-year student’s paper, I’d probably be fine with it. It doesn’t have the awkward, robotic feel of a ChatGPT essay. Unlike many student essays, real or fake, it cuts straight to a clear point, avoiding the formulaic structure that AP classes teach and that I spend weeks trying to unteach. Honestly, I might suggest tweaking a sentence, but it’s otherwise solid. If this is what cheating looks like now, I’m not sure how to even tell if my students are cheating. And if I can’t even trust their assignments, how can I trust that they wrote the thank-you notes I cherish so much? ChatGPT may offer students a shortcut to avoid skill-building, but it does more than that—it undermines the trust that is essential to any teaching relationship.