This also filed test is based on a transcribed conversation with Risa Morimoto, lecturer in economics at Soas University in London, in England. The following has been modified for duration and clarity.
Students are still cheating.
I have been a lecturer for 18 years, and I was dealing with cheating throughout this period, but with AI tools Becoming widely available in recent years, I have experienced a significant change.
There is definitely Positive aspects at AI. It is much easier to have access to information and students can use these tools to improve their writing, spelling and grammar, so there are fewer badly written tests.
However, I believe that some of my Students use AI to generate test content This draws the Internet information, instead of using equipment from my classes to complete their assignments.
IA is supposed to help us work effectively, but my workload has skyrocketed because of this. I have to spend a lot of time determining if the work that the students put back were really written by them.
I decided to take dramatic measures, by changing the way I assess students to encourage them to be more creative and to count less on AI. The world is changing, so universities cannot remain motionless.
Cheating has become more difficult to detect due to AI
I have been working at Soas in London University since 2012. My teaching objective is the ecological economy.
At the start, my teaching style was based on exams, but I found that students were worried about the punctual exams, and their results would not always correspond to their performance.
I finally pivoted by emphasizing the tests. The students chose their subject and consolidated the theories in a test. It worked well – until the AI arrived.
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Cheating was easier to spot. I would perhaps catch one or two students cheat in copy of huge pieces of text from Internet sources, leading to a case of plagiarism. Even two or three years ago, detecting inappropriate Use of AI was easier because of signs like robotic writing styles.
Now, with more sophisticated IA technologiesIt is more difficult to detect, and I believe that the magnitude of the cheating has increased.
I will read 100 trials and some of them will be very similar by using examples of identical cases, which I have never taught.
These examples are generally referenced on the internet, which makes me think that students use a AI tool which incorporates them. Some trials will cite 20 pieces of literature, but not one will be something from the reading list I have established.
Although students can use examples from Internet sources in their work, I fear that some students have used an AI to generate the content of the test without reading or engaging with the original source.
I started using AI detection tools To assess the work, but I know that this technology has limits.
AI tools are easy to access students who feel under pressure by the amount of work they have to do. University costs are increasing and many students work part -time, so it is logical for me that they want to use these tools to finish work faster.
There is no obvious way to judge the fault
During the first conference of my module, I will tell students that they can Use AI to check grammar Or summarize the literature to better understand it, but they cannot use it to generate answers to their assignments.
Soas a advice For the use of AI among students, which establishes similar principles on the fact of not using AI to generate tests.
In the past year, I sat on a panel of academic misconduct at university, dealing with students who have been reported for inappropriate use of AI in the departments.
I saw students refer to these directives and say that they only used AI to support their learning and not to write their answers.
It can be difficult to make decisions, because you cannot be 100% sure by reading the test if it is generated by Ai-Ai or not. It is also difficult to draw a line between cheating and using AI to support learning.
Next year, I will radically change my assignment format
My colleagues and I talk about the negative and positive aspects of AI, and we are aware that we still have a lot to learn about technology ourselves.
The university encourages teachers to change their teaching and evaluation practices. At the level of the department, we often discuss how to improve things.
I send my two young children in a school with an alternative and progressive education system, rather than a traditional British state school. See how my children are educated inspired me to try two alternative evaluation methods this upcoming academic year. I had to go through an official process with the university to approve them.
I will ask my students to choose a subject and produce a summary of what they learned in the class on this subject. Second, they will create a blog, so that they can translate what they understood from highly technical terms in a more transmitted format.
My goal is to make sure that assignments are directly linked to what we have learned in class and make evaluations more personal and creative.
The old evaluation model, which involves memorizing facts and regurgitating them with exams, is no longer useful. Cat can easily give you a good summary of information like this. Instead, educators must help students with general skills, communication and ready -to -use reflection.
In a declaration to BI, a SOAS spokesperson said that students were guided to use AI so as to “maintain academic integrity”. They said that the university has encouraged students to continue work that is more difficult to reproduce and reproduce and have “robust mechanisms” in place to investigate AI. “The use of AI is constantly evolving, and we regularly examine and update our policies to respond to these changes,” added the spokesperson.
Do you have a story to share on AI in education? Contact this journalist at ccheong@businessinsider.com.