On Cheating, Plagiarism, and the "Dangerous" World of AI

Disclaimer: This is probably a VERY different post than you expect it to be. Proceed with caution and an open mind 🤗

Cheating, plagiarism, AI use, Chat GPT. Let's talk about it. Let's unpack it because I know that it is on your mind throughout the school year, and that it will pop up in your middle school and high school classrooms. It's one of those inevitable nature-of-the-beast type things. So let's get into it 🤓

First, judge me if you want, but I used to cheat A LOT in high school (and even in undergrad in college) when it came to math classes.

I was never great at it, numbers have never really made sense to me, and I also never had what I would call caring math teachers or teachers that made me feel safe enough to ask for help.  I remember at one point my mom used to send me to this place called Sylvan Learning Center or something like that for math. And I guess it helped when I was younger, but she couldn't afford it long term, so eventually I stopped going, and the extra tutoring stopped.

And then math just got harder and harder. It always frustrated me, and I would often cry about it; I have a very vivid memory of running out of a portable, bawling, after I failed another math test, and the teacher was being condescending. Math was just never a fun time for me overall. I guess it's good I became an ELA teacher then 🤪

The reason I'm sharing this is because I want to preface that when it comes to cheating and plagiarism - all the things in that realm - I see it from a different lens than most teachers I know. I wasn’t a barely scraping by student (until senior year), but I definitely wasn’t an AP student either. I didn’t even read an entire book cover to cover until college (if we don’t count The Animorphs series or The Boxcar Children back in the day).

I’m not excusing my actions, but I am saying all this to say  I get it more than most when a kid seeks this as a means to end or a means to protect themselves from failure or an angry, violent parent. I always felt bad for students who were caught cheating or plagiarizing.

I’ve known many teachers who had very different experiences from me when they were in school - straight As, never broke a rule, never got detention, etc., and they would go all the way off the rails for students caught cheating/plagiarizing. Immediate referrals, admin involved, full-on power struggles, the whole 9, and I’m not saying those are not valid reactions, but I do know that dependent on our own experiences, sometimes we can only see one side of things.

So  I was always the teacher who gave the extra chances, allowed resubmissions, would say "let's do it together," that type of thing. I never really made a big deal about it until this one time around year 5, I felt betrayed by a student. 

 I had literally done most of the work with my students on an essay, and there was one student who still plagiarized and then lied to me about it during a one-on-one conference I had with them, which I always advocate for implementing. I asked them, "Is there anything you want to tell me about this paper? I'm not upset; I just want to have a conversation." And they were super tight-lipped, deny, deny, deny until the very end, even though Turn It In had flagged like a 92% rate or whatever it was, and it broke my heart.

 It broke my heart because I knew I was the teacher who built relationships, and I thought I had built a space where students felt safe enough to seek help and advocate for themselves and be honest, etc. I felt like, how could they still choose to cheat when I felt like I had given everything I hadn't had in school so they wouldn't feel the need to. It wasn’t until a few years after this incident when I had even more of those experiences, or even most recently right before I left the classroom when generative artificial intelligence (AI) became a thing, that I learned the even bigger lesson of acceptance.

The acceptance that  everyone has their own reasons for things that sometimes we'll never fully know or understand. And I know in this life we always want to know the ‘why’ because we think that if we know the why of things, then we can either solve whatever the issue is or do better in the future. But sometimes we will never know an individual why, and we have to move on and figure out solutions anyway.

I know the introduction of AI created this like new level of plagiarism or plagiarism problems and widespread teacher stress, but even when Chat GPT came out and I first tried prompting it to write me an essay about X, Y, Z so I could see what it could do, I guess I was somewhat impressed, more at the speed than anything, but at the same time, I didn't feel stressed the f*ck out.

In my mind, even still to this day, it doesn't make anything necessarily different from what it was before. There was no AI, nothing even close to it when I first started teaching, but students would still copy off Google, literally direct quotes, copy and paste, or copy from each other, or pay someone to do the work for them, or X, Y, Z. And so I don't think AI necessarily made cheating easier, it just made the generation of answers a whole lot faster.

And if you really think about it, the reason why this appeals to teenagers, especially, is for all the reasons that it should at their age. Based on child psychology, teens want things quick and easy. They don't want to struggle. If you add in the uptick in smartphones, social media, and screen time in general, and the immediateness of which they're used to getting positive results, dopamine, answers, anything they want, it's like why wouldn't a student seek the use of AI? In this tech-driven age, they're already used to immediate everything.

Add to that how in the last five years post-COVID, most students do not see a point to school, or to most classes, especially if they are not college-bound or college-driven. Further add in the way standardized tests and scripted curriculums are so rampant, and they're way over it. They don't see a point to school. They literally think their classes are worthless, and they hate that they're forced to go to school, feeling like a forced waste of policed time.

So these thick factors layered in, plus all the things we will never see and never understand, obviously, like why wouldn't a kid look to AI to help them with schoolwork, to do the schoolwork for them?

I wanted to mention all of these things because unpacking all that, trying to start flipping the pages backwards or finding solutions or starting to build solutions that attack these interlaced problems at the root, is not something that can be done in one class, in one subject area, in one school, in one school year.

It is something that is going to take a lot of time. That actually requires a lot of education reform. A lot of the system to change, and since none of that is going happen quickly, or sometimes happen even at all for a year, for five years, for 10 years, we have to learn to work alongside it.

I also know that there are often two different sides of the argument: either use AI with students or never let them see AI in the classroom/ban the access of it completely. I'm in between on this one. Not necessarily use AI with students, especially not all the time, but I'm definitely not of the belief system of not speaking about it or never mentioning it because I know that making topics taboo doesn't mean that they go away for students. It just means that students find ways around them and their own understanding of them.

So being very transparent and honest with students has always been a key pillar for me in my teaching philosophy. And I'll always stand by that - the transparency, the honesty, the explaining things to students, even if we think that they already know them, but explaining them from our point of view, breaking things down, being very calm, cool, and collected when talking about things that we think they think would upset us. And AI is one of those topics.

There are a bunch of lessons and resources out there about plagiarism rules and such, but I think even more important than that, or at least equal to it, is explaining to students that you get it. That you understand that sometimes assignments are hard and annoying, and they're not necessarily used to things being hard anymore since the invention of AI, and the smartphone, and the internet really, because now all answers are just out there everywhere for everyone to see at all times, and you understand all that. But what you want to help them build is resiliency, because resiliency is a lifelong skill.

Telling them, yes, especially if you're not college-bound, you might never have to write a five-paragraph essay with perfect parenthetical, MLA citations again, but you will have to make it through things in life that are difficult. No matter what career path you choose, no matter what your future looks like, you will have to persevere through tasks and things that are difficult and moments that are difficult because that is just the nature of life. And I want help you do that. And the only way I can help you do that is if we accept this productive struggle together through these tasks that I will assign you in this class.

Name that AI exists. Name that you are aware that Chat GPT and countless similar generative output systems are out there. Explain thoroughly that these platforms don't in fact actually think. That they simply generate output from information that already exists, which is why mistakes are present in the output. Name that for students and then show them an example. And if you want students to use it to brainstorm, do that. And then teach them how to use it productively. That depends on you and whichever way you feel the use of AI is best for your students in your classroom. But don't just avoid the conversation completely. Don't ignore it.

It's also worth talking to students about the darker sides of AI (deepfakes, misinformation, fake sources, etc.) and why they need digital literacy to navigate this world moving forward. Not only can these things be so dangerous and deeply harmful, but without maintaining a critical eye and critical thinking skills, it is too easy to get scammed or involved in a web of lies and subsequent problems.

The flip side of that is how I don't think it's necessarily fair to villainize AI as a whole, especially if you're using it to help you with teacher tasks. I think platforms like Diffit and Brisk are phenomenal AI-based tools that help save teachers time for tasks like differentiation and grading. Everyone has their faves and new ones come out each day it seems, but those are mine. Whatever floats your boat though, I think the same thing we preach to students should be how we use it ourselves. Always carefully, with a grain of salt, a human review, and as a tool for support, not a crutch to walk for us.

Name these truths for students, and also validate their experiences, their feelings, and the complexity of the age in which they live right now in a world that's very different from how we grew up.

School used to be the only option. You had to go to school, get the degree(s) so you could possibly one day have a bright, beautiful future, and get some type of 9-5 job (which required said degree) to get enough money to move forward and be successful in life. That's not the only option anymore, and students see that on a day-to-day basis. Don't ignore that. It's part of the reason they do not see the value of school and the assignments in it.

You can also tie conversations about these topics right back to what they're seeing in real life. Tie it back to their FYP pages. Discuss how bad things can blow up online when a creator decides to drop a new TikTok video that uses the same dance or the same exact content as another creator, and they don't give them credit. How do the original creators feel in those instances? How can things snowball? Discuss how social media is at a turning point where people are tired of perfect posts and obviously filtered pictures. Where users are craving real human input and connections again.

This is also when you get to teach students how to advocate for themselves. Most students do not naturally know how to advocate for themselves. That's a skill that has to be taught and a skill that has to be taught over time. Explain to students how they can reach out when they are struggling. Give students sentence stems they can use to start responses. Sit with students in student desks and casually write with them. Tell them to brain dump for you out loud verbally while you jot down what they say, and then give them the paper and say, okay, you have this to start with, and this is good. Circle the room as they write. Have them write first on paper, and then require that they use what they had on paper in their final pieces. Give students opportunities to write for fun, to write in competition-style games like We Will Write, Frankenstories, or My Short Answer, to write narratives, reflective pieces, journal prompts, randoms not for a grade.

In a time when we constantly have to ask, “Is this real or is this AI?,” it’s more important than ever to value our messy, authentic voices. Students need to know that their uncurated thoughts have power, even in literature analysis. Yes, we want them to value the process of revising their work, but students need to hear that their raw reactions and thoughts when reading, writing, and speaking have merit and should be celebrated.

Will any and all of this avoid future incidents of plagiarism? Hell no.

But this is where we learn to also accept that there will always be students who either fall between the cracks or make wrong decisions, even when you give your very best and all the support. Even when you do better than the teachers you had. And it’s not on you as a teacher to save everyone, to prevent everything. These situations will happen. Chaos will happen. Those shaking-our-head like damn, really?! moments WILL happen.

And none of that is on you.

It's on you to be the best teacher you know how to be with the tools you have in front of you. It's on you to be the most reflective teacher you know how to be with the information you have at the time you have it. It's on you to apologize to students when you mess up and then try again the next day or the next week, but the rest of it is not on you.

I can tell you though that when you do catch students in these situations,  remaining calm, cool, and collected with a neutral tone can go a long way. It's up to you if you want to give them another chance to redo X because I'm not telling you how to run your grading system, but I am saying that in those moments, you have an opportunity. 

You have an opportunity to open dialogue with a student before you give them an automatic zero, an opportunity to let them be honest before you just close the door on that assignment, an opportunity to help them grow from their mistakes.

I believe that the more we can bring in discussions about these items and be transparent with students, the less they will be tempted. The more we can lean into teaching students what it means to be human in a world where shortcuts are everywhere, beyond just why it matters in school, the less they might choose to simply copy/paste. The more that we show them that we value process over product, and practice over grading, the less they might doubt their own abilities and lean more into trying for real.

There is so much more left to say, but maybe I'll do a Part 2 for that. I don't have all the answers, none of this is easy and it is all ever-evolving, but I don't believe AI is the end of education, especially as we know it in the ELA realm. I think it opens a moment where we get to choose how we balance humanness with tech moving forward.