We don't beat AI cheating by going backwards
Cheating is as old as school itself. AI just made it effortless.
When I was a kid, cheating wasn’t super straightforward. You had to find a smarter friend who had done the work and was willing to let you copy. I wasn’t that lucky :).
However, with the advent of AI, cheating has become rampant.
The temptation to just ask ChatGPT to generate the answer is too much for many students.
I have even caught my own (normally studious) kids doing it.
I don’t think we are taking this epidemic seriously enough.
Because if students use AI to do the thinking for them they will never develop the core human capabilities they will need to survive in this new reality: curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration & judgment.
The instinct is to retreat. Ban the devices. Return to pen and paper. Make everything analogue again.
It won’t work.
Cheating doesn’t happen in the classroom. It happens at home.
Homework, take-home essays, projects done at the kitchen table — that’s where AI quietly does the work. A teacher can’t see it. They get a finished product with no window into how it was made.
You can’t supervise your way out of a problem that lives outside the room.
This is exactly where digital platforms come in, by providing something the analogue world is painfully short of. Data.
When learning happens on a platform, we can see patterns. Is a student’s home performance wildly out of step with their classroom performance? Is a result statistically improbable relative to their peers? Did they follow a pattern that doesn’t match how humans actually learn?
Paper hides all of this. Digital reveals it.
But algorithms should only flag. They shouldn’t judge. The decision — and the consequences — have to sit with the teacher, because the teacher is the one who knows the student. Maybe they’re a genius that will always look like a statistical outlier. Maybe their mother just died and they need a break, not a disciplinary hearing. No algorithm can tell the difference. A teacher can.
The irony is hard to miss: the same technology fuelling the cheating is the technology best equipped to catch it. The answer to AI isn’t less tech. It’s smarter tech — built to measure real learning, not just collect finished answers.
We don’t beat this by going backwards. We beat it by building forward.
Originally posted on LinkedIn.