“The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value.” – Ivan Illich
When I first started teaching, I thought that the students were cheating me when they cheated on a test or paper. This evolved into thinking the students were cheating themselves out of their own learning when they did that. Since at least the beginning of ChatGPT, I have realized what the students are actually cheating is a meaningless system of education.
This is a battle the system cannot win. It should be forcing teachers and administrators to ask some very deep questions about what the purpose of this educational exercise actually is. Is it to prepare our students for some sort of job or is it to prepare our students to face a world outside of school? While there is a lot of overlap, those are not the same thing.
If our primary purpose is credentialing, then we are marking them as being capable for a job. This shorthand for competence evolved over the last 75 years, where people are ruled out of jobs because they do not have a college education. However, if you ask the employer why they put this requirement in place, they often can’t really give you a good answer.
The system doesn’t communicate clearly to the students what the purpose of their learning is. Therefore, they buy into this mythology as well: that somehow having a piece of paper that says they graduated from an accredited institution prepares them to succeed in the world. If you ask them why this is, they also can’t give you a good answer.
The third group is the educators themselves. They are vested in a system whose purpose is to spit out degrees. Too often “learning” is measured by that benchmark. We are the drunk driver looking for his keys under the streetlight because that’s where the light is.
None of these benchmarks have anything to do with learning. This is the sad truth that sudden access to generative AI has stripped bare, but it has been recognizable for those who were paying attention since at least Web 2.0 came on the scene in the mid-2000s.
Culture is a hard thing to change. We have created a culture that supports the automated production of graduates in higher education. The students know they are widgets and behave accordingly. It’s just an exercise to get a degree. School becomes nothing more than a hazing exercise.
Why should we be surprised if, under these circumstances, the students rebel? A whole industry of products, from anti-plagiarism software to tools that limit internet access, has sprung up to aid the system in its vain attempts to stem that rebellion. However, to paraphrase Princess Leia: the tighter you grip, the more students will slip between your fingers.
Those of us who care about real learning find ourselves trapped between institutions demanding quick “student success” and students who just want to finish as easily as possible. Into this mix comes generative AI, which, if used poorly, makes shortcuts easier while stripping away the experience of learning. The result should not surprise us.
However, those students who learn how to dodge work in college using AI are in for a rude awakening when all they can do it is to try to get out of working in their jobs. If you can dodge work at your job using AI, you can be replaced by AI.
This applies to education as well. The more rote we make it, the more vulnerable it is to being replaced by automated systems. This isn’t learning but it is “efficient” at moving widgets through the process toward their “completion.”
I have written before about the tremendous opportunities that AI presents to us to teach and learn in very different ways. If we use it to augment ourselves and not automate ourselves, it can become a powerful tool for both teacher and student. If, instead, we spend all our energies somehow trying to freeze it out of the system, we are only asking for disappointment, frustration and eventual obsolescence.
Who is actually cheating here? Is it the educational system clinging to outdated methods and mechanisms for achievement? Or is it the student somehow trying to navigate an arcane and unfamiliar world of education in pursuit of some elusive goal? Or is it both?
More so than most technologies, AI provides us with tremendous opportunities to reinvent ourselves and what we are doing iteratively. It opens new ways to apply critical thinking, iteration, and creativity to augment our learning.
However, systems must also change. Assessing students based on how well they do on high-stakes tests or rote papers is a tool of convenience (looking for our keys). Yet, that is still the dominant method of assessment practiced in education.
Instead, all instruction should force the students to solve problems using AI as a partner. Whether that problem is writing or designing a physics or math experiment, forcing students to engage in the material in this manner strengthens their motivation, skills, and their interactions with technology.
I use AI in the classroom to generate just-in-time exercises that reinforce lessons that the students don’t understand fully. I also teach them how to use it to overcome their own creative and writing obstacles by using it to brainstorm assignments and edit them dynamically. This is just the beginning of what is possible.
On the instructional design front, I used it to reinvent my course in days instead of weeks by removing much of the detailed rote work of balancing and sequencing assignments. I have also used it to simplify complex instructions for assignments, which is critical to the practice of formative assessment strategies.
In the real world, your boss doesn’t care if you “cheat” if you get the job done. However, getting that job done will require you to have the skills to augment yourself with AI-driven tools, whether you’re a teacher, a student, or a professional employee.
For those of us trying to untie the Gordian Knot of the intertwingled drivers of systems of education and disempowered students, life can be a very frustrating experience. Gaming those systems is a natural byproduct of this tension.
The good news there is that we can use AI to try to reduce our levels of frustration by easing rote tasks thrown up by the needs of the system. I guess that makes us cheaters too, but I can live with that. If we don’t learn to “cheat” the system ourselves, we’ll cheat our students out of real learning.