Define Cheating

“At the beginning of each new class, Al Rabanera lets his students know that he knows they’re using AI.”

“’I’m not going to pretend like you aren’t,’ he tells his students. ‘I know it’s readily available for most of you, if not all of you.’”

“A math teacher at La Vista High School in Fullerton, California, where he works with students as old as 19 who are struggling to get enough credits to graduate. Rabanera has watched AI creep into homework assignments over the past few years as students use powerful tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini to race through assignments.”

“It has forced him to change his approach.”

“He has stopped sending home problems that can be lifted wholesale into an AI chatbot and pasted back into an assignment. Instead, he builds lessons around what students actually care about, creating, for instance, a unit on buying a car that weaves together calculating interest rates and monthly payments with learning about credit scores. He has replaced rote problem sets with one-of-a-kind poster projects and in-class design challenges.”

“When Rabanera assigns practice, he often has students devise their own word problems around personal interests to prove they understand the underlying concepts.”

“He’s hardly the only one scrambling to try something new: Nationwide, teachers at all levels are rethinking, scaling back or, in some cases, abandoning homework altogether as evidence mounts that students who outsource their assignments to AI aren’t just submitting work that isn’t theirs. They’re surrendering the cognitive struggle that makes learning stick and makes homework, well, work.”

“New large-scale research suggests that teachers’ fears are valid. A recent study [at the University of California, Irvine] analyzed 3.2 million student math problems on the digital ALEKS platform over a decade and found that after ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, high school students spent 31% less time on word problems – the kind easily copy-pasted into an AI – compared with graph-based problems that required a hands-on interaction with the platform. College students showed a 27% decline.”

“When students were tested under proctored conditions with no access to AI, the copy-paste behavior vanished. And when researchers examined whether students had actually retained anything, they found that the odds of correctly answering AI-susceptible word problems fell by 25% in the post-ChatGPT years.”

This excerpt comes from “The End of Homework? Teachers Grapple With Cheating in the Age of AI,” an article published earlier this month by The 74.

And whether it be homework, classwork, or any other work connected with learning, what this excerpt suggests is that the way adult learning leaders go about assisting in getting young learners smarter and stronger is going to change with the advent of artificial intelligence, if it hasn’t changed already.

The learning revolution, brought on by artificial intelligence and its cousins social media and the cellphone, will demand a change in how we define, plan, execute, and evaluate who learning will happen akin to the change we saw when most of us stopped farming and moved to the city.

School districts that delay embracing the challenge of how learning happens with these advanced devices will only fall further behind. Schools will need more learning leaders like Al Rabanera, people who aren’t afraid to change their instructional strategies to take advantage of the technology available today and in the future.

So why are we delaying? Let’s begin the change now.

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. Til then. SVB