(423) The LMS is Dead

Plus, Yale says nothing. Plus, see you at ICAI? Plus, a class note.

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Meet LMS Assassin Einstein

Yes, it’s hyperbole to say the LMS is dead.

But it’s not hyperbole to say there are serious questions about its future use as an academic assessment engine. The day has been coming when agentic AI, automated bots, would render any online, not directly supervised assignment or assessment moot.

That day has probably arrived.

Sent in by a reader, meet Einstein, from a company calling itself companion.ai. The very introduction says Einstein:

logs into Canvas every day, watches lectures, reads essays, writes papers, participates in discussions, and submits your homework — automatically.

Canvas, as you likely know, is a leading learning management system (LMS). And now, if you’re a student and your class uses Canvas, or other LMS, as something like 95% of them do, there’s no point in even showing up — not even online.

More from the Einstein website, it:

Logs into Canvas for you

Einstein connects to your Canvas account, sees your assignments, and submits completed work — automatically.

And:

Give him a reading assignment and he reads the full text, understands it, and writes original essays with proper citations.

And:

Works while you sleep

Set him up and forget about it. Einstein checks for new assignments and knocks them out before the deadline.

And:

No more copy-pasting

Forget switching between ChatGPT and your LMS. Einstein reads the assignment, solves it, and submits it directly.

I love how this assumes that you were just copy-pasting AI junk into your LMS. It’s probably true; they know their audience. But thank the stars Einstein has come along so you don’t need to do all that hard cut-and-paste anymore.

Einstein’s FAQ are also amazing:

How does Einstein access my Canvas?

You link your Canvas account once during setup. Einstein uses your credentials to log in, view assignments, and submit work on your behalf.

And:

Will my professor know?

Einstein submits assignments from your account just like you would. The work is original and generated per-assignment — not copied from a database.

Let me answer that one with brevity: probably not.

I also know who doesn’t care — or at least has not cared up until now — the LMS companies. For years they have taken a “not our problem” approach to industrial cheating and assessment security on their platforms. Although I suspect that this threat will be a little harder to ignore. Which does not mean they won’t try.

One LMS has already said they can’t stop AI agents (see Issue 409). At the time I said I did not believe them. I still don’t. And there is growing evidence that they can, if they wanted to.

It’s clear that unless a teacher, program, or school can guarantee that any given student did not use AI or AI agents in the LMS, we should assume they may have. As such, I think every single assignment, assessment, or grade given on or through an LMS must be suspect at the most basic level — its relation to work, understanding, or mastery.

The problem is, as mentioned, that’s got to be 95% of all secondary and college work — even in-person classes process work in LMS systems. That's got to change. Like immediately. Maybe that will get LMS providers to address the corruption of their platforms. Maybe.

Anyway — RIP the LMS.

ICAI, March 6-8 in Denver

The annual conference of ICAI, the International Center for Academic Integrity, is just days away — March 6 to 8.

If you’re going and want to meet up, please let me know. A reply e-mail to The Cheat Sheet reaches me.

See you there.

Yale Update

In Issue 420, we shared and covered an NBC story about AI use and AI detection. That NBC offering noted that some students had sued schools when they believed they’d been wrongly accused of cheating.

Although this practice is old — well predating generative AI — NBC uses the legal challenges as a kind of proof that AI detection is unreliable.

One such case comes from Yale, where a student in a part time MBA program for executives sued, claiming he was incorrectly accused of using AI in his work. The student was suspended for one year from the program — not for cheating, but for not being forthcoming with the inquiry, according to press reports. The student sued anonymously, which courts rejected, along with his request for an injunction.

I mention this because the last news on the case is nearly a year old now and I asked Yale for an update — not a comment, necessarily, just an update. I asked twice earlier this month and, as is common, the school did not respond.

Most schools seem to genuinely believe that if they just close their eyes hard enough, cheating won’t exist.

Class Notes:

A very brief note here on the frequency of The Cheat Sheet.

Some of you may have noticed that it had been a bit since our last issue — two weeks, in fact. I assure you that the gap doesn’t mean much. Two weeks ago, I was out of town for a few days and last Wednesday I had hand surgery. In addition to knocking me off my routine, it’s made typing a slow, tedious challenge. While I recover, I will do my best to keep pace.

As always, should you have news to share, things to say, The Cheat Sheet is open. Please save me from typing.