"Welcome to the New Age of Academic Dishonesty"
Plus, U.K. accounting watchdog finds assessment cheating. Plus, Quick Bites from India, Canada and in sports.
Issue 176
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The New Age of Academic Dishonesty
While I am reluctant to devote too much time to reporting done by the New York Post, this story is worth sharing and getting into a little. It begins:
Welcome to the new age of academic dishonesty.
To which I say, welcome. You’re late.
Anyway, the article is about the AI text-creator, ChatGPT and - surprise, surprise - cheating. The NY Post is like the 800th outlet to write this story. The Washington Post, for example, ran another one this week too, again quoting Turnitin saying they will be able to detect ChatGPT. I cannot share them all; there are simply too many.
But back to the NY Post iteration - it stands out in that it reports on actual cheating:
A college professor in South Carolina is sounding the alarm after catching a student using ChatGPT
Furman University, by the way. And, imagine that.
The professor said:
“As soon as I reported this on Facebook, my [academic] friends said, ‘Yeah, I caught one too.'”
Again, imagine that. The professor also is reported as sharing that:
proving that the paper was concocted by ChatGPT was nearly impossible.
It’s not. And it will be even easier soon. Even so, the instructor continued that he:
fears that other cases will be almost impossible to prove, and that he and his colleagues will soon be inundated with fraudulent work, as universities like Furman struggle to establish formal academic protocols for the developing technology.
For now, [he] says that the best he can do is surprise suspected students with impromptu oral exams, hoping to catch them off-guard without their tech armor.
Sounds right.
And so, yeah, the New York Post reports on cheating with ChatGPT. CNN had the Furman story too - with a video interview of the professor.
It’s important to keep reminding people that ChatGPT and its cousins aren’t just an amusing sideline - students are using them to cheat right now, today.
U.K. Accounting “Watchdog” Finds Cheating on Professional Exams, Assessments
Last week, the accounting watchdog in the U.K. said that, after a review, it found:
"instances of cheating" in exams for professional qualifications and that it may punish audit firms or industry bodies.
This comes on the heels of similar inquiries, findings and fines in the U.S. and Australia and Canada (see Issue 131 or Issue 57). It’s been a problem. And that it has been reinforces the idea that if you look for cheating, you will find it.
Reporting continued:
The [regulator] said that information received so far does not point to "systemic" cheating, but improvements were needed to how exams and course work are assessed and invigilated.
That reads to me as though another professional accreditor and career gatekeeper is going to add to its exam and assessment security, including invigilation or proctoring. This is not a trend - see Issue 172 for only the most recent example.
Quick Bites:
The High Court in India has compared academic cheating to “the plague which can ruin society and the education system,” adding that students, “using such unfair means have to be dealt with a heavy hand.” The Court said further that, “Students who resort to unfair means and get away with it, cannot build this nation.”
Also in India, reporting is that the “general knowledge test for teachers recruitment” in a state was cancelled just hours before it was set to start, after leaked copies of the test were discovered - 44 people and 37 students were arrested. Teachers.
The Guardian has a story this week asking, “why did cheating scandals plague sports in 2022?” Good question. “The sports world in 2022 was staggered by one cheating scandal after another – suggesting that there is an endemic problem in professional competition,” they wrote. A few of these we got to in The Cheat Sheet, but I’d suggest the cheating was not just in professional competition - respectfully.
In Toronto, students at University of Toronto Mississauga have asked the school to allow students to review evidence of academic misconduct at least four weeks before any hearing(s) and have also asked for “a time limit for resolving academic misconduct cases, capping Departmental and Decennial cases at two months and Tribunal meetings at six months.” Seems reasonable, but. The school had a reported 1,799 cases of academic misconduct in 2020-21 (see Issue 126) so, I’m not sure how that’s going to work.
Class Notes:
In the last Issue of The Cheat Sheet, I included a link to the press release from Crossplag announcing their tool to catch ChatGPT text. The link was wrong. Here is the correct link: https://crossplag.com/ai-detector-for-education/
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