Student Cheating Is Becoming Impossible to Detect in an A.I. Era

[wnylib]

13. Long before AI, there were online services that offered to

write research papers and essays for students. They even offered choices of what grade to achieve, e.g. A, B, or C. That was so a C student who suddenly turned in an A paper would not be suspected of cheating.

Also, I met a couple good students who earned extra cash by writing papers for struggling students.

So, one of my suspicious professors popped sudden writing assignments on students, to be completed in class. Cell phones were rare then, and had no Internet access, but that could be handled today by forbidding their use during the assignment done in the classroom.

I was one of the students that he suspected of cheating. I learned about his suspicions of me from another professor who went to bat for me because I was able to discuss my papers knowledgeably when questioned and cite sources.

I studied, worked hard on my research and writing, commuted across the county for classes, and worked several hours a week in addition to full time classes. I resented students who cheated just as much as the faculty did. It was insulting to be accused of cheating just because I turned in some good papers.

The suspicious professor stopped suspecting me when I turned in a fairly good paper from his in-class experiment. Of course it had the quality of a rough draft, without time for review and editing. But apparently it was good enough for him to lay off of the accusations.