Most at Australian Universities using ChatGPT to cheat their way to a degree. By Ros Thomas in The Australian.
Example:
Picture this: it’s final exam week at Macquarie University in Sydney and Hayden, 24, is less than a month away from graduating with a bachelor’s degree in social sciences. It has cost him more than $45,000 and this is his final push to the finish line; his assessments are all conducted online, with students given 48 hours to turn in their answers.
It’s 7.40am, 20 minutes before the exam is due to begin, and Hayden is still asleep. Has he slept through his alarm, exhausted from late-night cramming? Nope. The only work he’s done for this exam is researching which AI tool will cheat him the best marks.
In a minute or two, Hayden will roll out of bed, slap some water on his face and fire up his laptop. At 8am he’ll feed his exam paper into ChatGPT. By 8.06am it will have gifted him 30 correct answers. Hayden knows a perfect score might trip the university’s AI detectors, so he’ll deliberately mangle a couple of responses to get him 94 per cent. Then he’ll wait three hours to mimic a genuine exam effort, before firing his A-plus paper back to his examiner.
Welcome to the death of higher education.
Hayden has now graduated with a High Distinction. How much of his final year studies did he outsource to AI? “All of it,” he says without skipping a beat. “It’s completely insane. In my smaller units, AI was covering 100 per cent of my coursework and 100 per cent of my exams. And that’s not me outing myself, that’s me outing everyone. You’ve got like, five per cent of students still putting in hours and hours of effort, and 95 per cent of us who are crawling out of bed ten minutes before exams and winging it with AI.
“In my whole degree, I never had an in-person exam. … Now you can get ChatGPT to do your entire degree. In fact, you’d be stupid not to use AI if you want to do well.” …
Don’t you feel guilty?
“Everyone was getting through, so the guilt just vanished. It’s a free-for-all. Me and my friends can’t believe how blatant the cheating is. We know some random person walking down the street will know more about our degrees than we do.” …
Over and over I’ve heard the same defence: “It’s not cheating if everyone’s doing it.” …
In person exams are the obvious solution. No way!
Hayden is struck by another recollection and laughs: “You know, one semester a lecturer decided he was gonna make everyone turn up in person for the exam. There was complete panic because we all knew we couldn’t cheat and our marks would be a disaster. It scared us for weeks – so much so, the head lecturer was flooded with written excuses: ‘Sorry, but I can’t be at uni that day’ or ‘Sorry, I have family commitments’ or transport issues or some other random reason they couldn’t show up. Eventually he rolled over and announced, ‘OK, so we’re going to have to make that exam online.’ It was the biggest relief of my life.” …
How many students are cheating?
Young Australians are now cheating their way through university at a rate that’s making a mockery of our sandstone institutions. No longer is the accumulation of knowledge a rewarding process of brainwork, error and painstaking self-correction. AI is giving students top grades for zero intellectual work.
I’ve interviewed six senior academics in three states, including heads of school in media and communications, physics, mathematics, statistics and chemistry. All but one put student fraud at more than 80 per cent.
And yet each of the students I spoke to for this story scoffed at that figure, saying the rate of “full-bore” cheating in their units is more like 95 per cent. …
But calculators:
AI devotees resort to the standard Silicon Valley defence on ethics: Remember the furore over calculators? That amounted to nothing, right? Calculators didn’t destroy maths. Calculators did the grunt work and freed up students to do more complex thinking. …
These are glib analogies, because ChatGPT doesn’t extend cognition. It’s a parasite that attaches itself to a vulnerable learning ecosystem like a university then starves the host, usurping academics, teaching and learning. …
The end for universities and most academics:
Among faculty staff, the overriding mood is dismay. Lecturers and tutors stare at essays bloated with mechanical phrasing and facile logic that reads nothing like typical student rhetoric. ….
Teaching has now devolved into absurdism: academics are well aware they’re grading chatbots, …
Dr Jonathan Albright … at the University of Western Australia, believes most universities are not prepared for the scale of AI’s takeover of education. … “AI is gunning for academics’ jobs,” he says. “If universities don’t confront the threat of AI, you will walk onto a campus in ten years’ time and they’ll be deserted. Even now, I have tutorials where only one student shows up. In courses without strict participation policies, I’m seeing lecture attendance drop to seven per cent. So what are the other 93 per cent doing? My lectures are not 6pm on a Friday night. They’re 10am on a Tuesday. Why aren’t they in class? I’ll tell you why. You don’t need to show up if AI is doing your assessments for you. Watch this space: it’s going to get ugly.” …
He sighs. “Look, universities are trying to live with the threat of AI, but it’s going to eat them alive.”
Can’t think, can’t write, can’t create:
“AI’s goal is to replace the human brain, to replace the cognitive participation that active learning requires. Once it’s culturally acceptable to outsource learning to a chatbot, we’ll have graduates who can produce content but can’t validate a claim or formulate an argument, who won’t ever experience failure or have to learn how to rewrite or revise or reflect.
“Some disciplines are more vulnerable than others. The social sciences and humanities will be hit hard by this disruption. They need to be first to push back and adapt because humanities degrees will be devalued to the point that students will opt out of them completely. And engineering will have its own crisis, because AI will anaesthetise students’ ability to think critically and test equations. No way would I trust a bridge built by engineers who outsourced their degree to AI.” …
Dependence on AI has created students who can’t think, can’t write, can’t create. Some in academia believe Gen Z are in danger of becoming post-literate. …
I interview Julia, a business school lecturer who has spent 22 years in academia at five universities… “Undergrads are arriving straight from high school who are unable to add up double digits on paper. Who can’t read a book. Whose attention spans have been wiped out by an adolescence spent on screens. They can’t make eye contact. They can’t have any kind of verbal exchange with me.”
“I’m lucky if I get 20 per cent attention in class — 80 per cent are face down on their phones doing I don’t know what. Some will read to me from their laptops the ChatGPT answer to what I’ve just asked. It’s absurd. AI is producing the lowest denominator of undergrad intellect in university history, and ChatGPT — unchecked, unregulated, unmonitored — continues to churn out worthless degrees.” …
Cheats don’t admits it, because our system was built on high trust:
Helen, 61, a postgraduate nursing lecturer at a prominent South Australian university, is refusing to surrender to ChatGPT. “The students I flag for full-blown cheating come in kicking and screaming, furious at being caught,” she says. “No shame. No guilt. At least two-thirds of them will continue to vehemently deny their cheating even when we can see their work is 100 per cent faked. And let’s not forget we’re talking about Honours and Masters students — the cream of the crop. They’ve worked out that if they squeal loudly enough, the university will shy away from failing them. The executive doesn’t want stoushes causing nasty publicity”.
“So do you fail students for cheating?” I ask.
“I’m trying. I call the worst offenders into my office. They don’t say sorry or ask for a second chance. They stare me down and say, ‘How dare you accuse me of lying?’ Some bring their parents with them to intimidate me, parents who demand I overturn the fail grade because ‘we’re footing the bill for this degree’. And I say, ‘No. Your daughter is sitting an exam to see if she qualifies for this degree and she still has to earn it.’”
Read it all.
Thinking is so 20th century. Will AI be the last gift from the people who invented the modern world, to the new dumbed down generations who didn’t and now cannot?
