AI, Part 1

It’s mid-week before the Memorial Day holiday. Let’s use this time to discuss two very different tales involving artificial intelligence. Today we discuss AI and how it will continue to change how we view testing and cheating. Tomorrow we’ll talk about how AI is impacting our current and future job market.

We’ve talked about how everything will change with artificial intelligence. That change has now come to Princeton University and their famous Honor Code. In an article posted on The Atlantic online last week, staff writer Rose Horowitch reported that Princeton’s Honor Code was no match for chatbot-enabled cheating.

“In 1876, an editorial in Princeton’s newly founded campus newspaper, The Princetonian, argued against the use of proctors to monitor exams. Proctoring was ‘a means of bad moral education,’ the author wrote. Treat students as presumptively dishonest, and some would become so; treat them as honorable, and they would learn to behave honorably. And so the editorial board suggested a different approach: ‘Let every man write at the end of his paper a pledge that he has neither given nor received help, and let professors and tutors address themselves to some better business than watching for fraud.’”

“That proposal was eventually embodied in Princeton’s famous Honor Code, adopted in 1893 and modified only lightly in the ensuing 133 years. When students take their final exams, professors leave the room. Students write down a pledge not to cheat. They are expected to report anyone who does. Any student accused of impropriety comes before a jury of their peers.”

“The Honor Code had a good run. F. Scott Fitzgerald (who enrolled in Princeton in 1913 but did not graduate) once wrote that violating it ‘simply doesn’t occur to you, any more than it would occur to you to rifle through your roommate’s pocketbook.’ The code lasted through two world wars, the upheaval of the 1960’s, the disillusionment of Watergate, and even the rise of search engines and SparkNotes. It finally met its match in generative AI. Yesterday, after the rise of AI-facilitated cheating became too obvious to ignore, Princeton’s faculty voted to begin proctoring exams again. Technically, the Honor Code is still in place. Students will still sign a pledge that they didn’t cheat. But now professors will be watching to make sure they’re telling the truth. The Honor Code can’t run on the honor system anymore.”

Here’s a prediction:

Princeton professors will be watching to make sure their students aren’t cheating on tests for only a short time.

Because testing, assessment, and evaluation are getting ready to undergo serious change.

We now can allow adult learning leaders, whether they be higher education professors, high school English teachers, or early childhood instructors teaching 4-year-olds how to read, to build one-to-one relationships with their learners. And that personalized relationship will allow adult learning coaches to decide whether their learners know what they need to know about a topic by interviews emphasizing question-and-answer and/or discussion protocols. Gone are the paper and pencil tests that have dominated the American education scene since Horace Mann stole the idea from the Prussians back in the mid-19^th century. Gone are the essays that, let’s face it, too many students cheated on even before ChatGPT became a thing.

It’s hard to cheat with the help of anytime of artificial intelligence when it’s you, as a young learner, face-to-face with your adult learning coach, whether in-person or online.

And what will make this personalized educational experience possible for millions and millions of young learners? Of course, it will be the adult learning leaders, and the support they receive from their artificial intelligence assistants, that will make the difference in making more young learners smarter and stronger readers, writers, problem-solvers, and citizens.

More on AI tomorrow. SVB