AI Cheating and Controversies in Education - DTNS Weekend  ## Metadata - Author: [[Daily Tech News Show]] - Full Title: AI Cheating and Controversies in Education - DTNS Weekend - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/a0950af5-4f48-4f03-bedd-d4d528a46e2e ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **AI Cheating as Modern Cheat Method** - Cheating with AI like large language models is an updated form of traditional cheating methods. - Faculty respond by creating personalized, experience-based assignments and discussing work one-on-one with students. Transcript: Kevin Metcalf No, those are great questions. I mean, on the teaching front, the elephant in the room is cheating, right? If I ask a student to write a five-page paper on Moby Dick, can they just ask the AI to give it to them, right? And this is sort of the modern spin on asking your buddy who passed the class last year to write the paper for you or paying somebody online to do it you know or in my day going to the world Book and just copying the entry right yeah exactly it's always weird you know after being in higher ed as long as i have i'm still always surprised when i find out someone is willing to Pay for an education but not get the education they paid for. You know, so it's always been possible to cheat. But yeah, the LLMs make it quite a bit easier, really lowers that barrier to entry. And so, you know, faculty are having to get creative with assignments, you know. Maybe that looks like designing an assignment around applying course material to an experience that the student has lived through. Or, you know, meet with the students one-on and have them read through their work and explain their reasoning for that, you know. Or, you know, if you want to teach them how to use the tools, give them a prompt. Tell them, push this one through an AI and then critique what it gives you. You know, what did it get right? What did it get wrong? What did it miss? You know, and a shift that may needs to happen is just really communicating to the students why it's important to actually understand the material. ([Time 0:03:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f49605bc-bbae-4cc1-b9ac-3ba12cc91393)) - **Colleges Shift to Certification Role** - Colleges have shifted from information providers to certification bodies. - Degrees now serve as a shortcut for employers to assess candidates' knowledge efficiently. Transcript: Kevin Metcalf And I think part of what's going on here, the issue is that education has really shifted over the last several years. You know, it used to be that colleges and universities were in the information business. If you want to learn something, that's where you have to go. They would hire people with the most knowledge and hope that they were capable of imparting that knowledge to others in a way that they could understand. And that's really changed. I mean, if I want to learn something, I don't take a class on it. I go to YouTube, right? And so colleges and universities are basically in the certification business now. You know, we put our reputation on the line every time we say, Jenny knows all this stuff about computer science because she got a degree. Right. And so employers use the degrees we award when they're evaluating whether somebody really knows their stuff. You know, it's kind of a shortcut. If HR gets 300 resumes for a position, they don't always have enough time to just go through all of them in detail, trying to make sure, does somebody have the knowledge they need? ([Time 0:04:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6c5fc19a-1a26-4296-a730-911d63954778)) - **AI Challenges IT Governance** - AI tools used by staff can create governance challenges for IT departments. - Documents from AI could become part of public records but are harder to track compared to centralized email. Transcript: Kevin Metcalf And I mean, on the IT front, if staff and faculty are using AI and I don't know about that in IT, that can have some ramifications that end users probably haven't considered. Depending on what kind of school you are, AI-generated meeting transcripts could be subject to a public records request. They could become discoverable in potential legal action. And I'm not suggesting that people are doing things they need to hide or anything like that. Just that for IT, it means that as part of our work, we have to be able to find those documents. We have to be able to track them down. And that's something that currently happens pretty easily with email, right? Email tends to be centralized. And so it's easy for me to just tell my system administrator, hey, these are the keywords you got to search for. Find it, export it, turn it over. But if some staff member just adds a random AI bot to a Zoom meeting, how does IT know about that? How do I know to go look for that? You know, we don't want to be in a situation where there is something that should be public record, but we don't know we have it to turn it over when it's asked for. ([Time 0:06:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/052f20cc-ba18-4607-af52-e4ab792e4c80)) - **AI Policy and Accreditation Complexity** - Educational policies regarding AI evolve slowly due to cautious deliberation and regulatory complexity. - Accreditation processes benefit from AI by assisting reviewers in managing large amounts of evidence efficiently. Transcript: Tom Merritt Right, right. Kevin Metcalf And so that sort of leads us to this idea of all of the issues that the administration has to deal with. Like many governmental entities, education doesn't always move very fast. If you put a bunch of people in a room that are generally paid to think about things, they tend to overanalyze things, you know, so developing AI policies can take a while, you know, because, Because people want to get it right. And, you know, they'll, they'll argue over the minutiae there. Yeah. Tom Merritt I think that's a really good point. A lot of times people jump to the conclusion that the folks making the policies just don't know what they're doing or they don't get it. And when a lot of times they're just they're just being careful. Kevin Metcalf Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it has, you know, has impacts on our accreditation cycle as well. That's one of those education terms. So in order to prove the school is actually doing what they claim to be doing and in higher, so that our students can get financial aid, schools go through an accreditation cycle. And that process involves producing a report stating what you're doing, and just a massive amount of evidence to back all of that up. And I'm oversimplifying this, but the details are boring, so we'll gloss over that. ([Time 0:11:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7535f2b2-397f-4450-92a4-461f1a973e7b)) - **Who Uses AI Most in Education?** - Students are the most frequent AI users, employing it for both cheating and learning. - IT management staff also use AI tools regularly to improve efficiency due to workload pressures. Transcript: Kevin Metcalf Yeah, I will say it's a recent enough development that I don't have a lot of hard evidence. But from talking with my colleagues, I would say that students probably use the tools the most. And I think the students would tell you, yes, we use it the most. And different students use them in different ways, right? Obviously some cheat, but some use the tools as tutors to help them learn. And I would suggest that it may also be tied to where the students are coming from. Are they really motivated to learn or are they just going through the motions because they have to? Some students coming to our colleges, they're coming from these really high achieving schools in the Bay Area, and they're very motivated to actually learn. But ultimately, it's going to be up to every teacher to really help students understand the positive and the negative ways to use those tools. Between faculty and administrators, it's a little harder for me to answer, but I do know that my colleagues in IT management around the state use these tools pretty regularly. Most educational institutions are just underfunded, right? ([Time 0:13:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4d59e19f-e500-46c9-9a6b-eada5ba67f0d)) - **AI Personalizes and Supports Students** - AI can personalize education by aligning schedules with student needs and life circumstances. - First-generation students especially benefit from AI guidance navigating complex school systems. Transcript: Kevin Metcalf Oh, man, these are great questions. This is the kind of thing that gets me out of bed in the morning, right? Figuring out how do we work on this? You know, there are so many opportunities for efficiency gains on, you know, operations, administrative tasks, you know, things like that. In terms of, you know, just enhancing the education experience, I mean, education is a mystery, right? A student going from, I should go to college to, I have a degree. That student is not walking an obvious path, right? You have to apply to be admitted. You have to figure out what you want your major to be, register for all the right classes. Well, if you don't know the language, that's a huge hurdle, right? Well, what if your guidance counselor could work with you and your personal AI assistant to come up with the optimal schedule? I mean, maybe you're planning to go to school full time and the regular course schedule works for you. But what if you're a single parent and you're working a couple of jobs and you can only take online classes or classes at a certain time? Well, an LLM that's been trained on the course catalog and historic scheduling data, that could be the difference between getting your degree in four years or getting your degree in Eight years. As for the haves and have not question, I think AI can actually also help level the playing field. If your parents and your siblings went to college, then they can probably answer your questions if you get lost in the process. But for a first-generation student, where do you go? It's an AI that's been trained on the various student services that are available at a school can help them figure out what to do next or where to go for help. That can be the difference between getting a degree and dropping out of school. Imagine if your phone periodically had a pop-up from the AI agent asking, what are you struggling with this week? ([Time 0:15:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/18ca77b0-cc56-4afc-856a-7f3db319732b)) - **AI Enables Early Student Support** - AI-driven predictive analytics can identify struggling students early by analyzing online class data. - Early intervention can provide resources to help students avoid dropping out due to overwhelm. Transcript: Kevin Metcalf So if all of our instructors are using the learning management system, if you've taken a class in the last five years, you definitely know what this is. It's a tool like, you know, Canvas or Blackboard or Moodle, basically an online shell where the instructors can put their assignments and can store their grades. Well, if all the instructors have their assignments and grades there, an LLM can process all that data in real time and advise the counseling department, hey, this student is falling Behind in multiple classes. For me, as a single faculty member in one class, that's something that happens. And I don't know. It's not just my class. Right. You know, there's a chance there to reach out to the student and see what's going on, you know, provide additional resources if needed, or at least have the, you know, the counselors Talk to the faculty and say, hey, you know what? This student's going to need more time on their assignments. They got to get caught up in four classes, you know. ([Time 0:18:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/63eff1c7-4c8f-490d-91ed-36d28cb69093)) - **Teach AI Ethics Across Disciplines** - Education must focus on teaching AI ethics and critical thinking, not just tool usage. - AI impacts all disciplines, so curricula need comprehensive updates to prepare students for future careers. Transcript: Kevin Metcalf Yeah, this is one of those ones where I want to be very clear that I am wearing my personal experience hat and not my, I am a manager at this organization hat. You know, I think you've hit on the core struggle here, you know, that education is facing right now with respect to AI in general. You know, our goal as educators is to teach students to be informed and empowered digital citizens, not just people that have been trained to use a tool. You know, I think about how much the world of technology has changed since I graduated in the 90s, right? There's no reason to think that the next 40 years won't see that same pace of change, if not even something bigger, right? I can't even imagine what that would look like. So it's about teaching ethics and not tools, you know, and a major struggle that I'm seeing is that it's not just computer science, right? A lot of people think, well, AI, that's the computer science world. Well, nearly every area of study needs to update their curriculum around these questions. You know, imagine if you are taking an accounting class or a journalism class and they thought this was a computer science issue and didn't bother to talk about AI in their curriculum, Right? That could be a problem because it just impacts everything. So we need to make sure that we are appropriately embedding these critical thinking skills in every area of study, right? And if students are going to graduate without those skills, they're going to have a hard time finding a job later on, right? And that's part of what we're here to do is to certify, you know, again, that they know how to do these things that are necessary. So, you know, to really prepare our students for their career, schools have to figure out how to provide resources to the faculty that are building these courses. You know, we can't expect every faculty in every discipline to become an AI ethics expert overnight or even at all, right? So at our colleges, we actually have full-time staff who are experts in online pedagogy. And there's another one of those fancy words. It just means how to teach effectively. But any faculty member who wants to teach online has to be trained by the staff in order to learn what works online and what doesn't work online. And we're gonna need to have something similar for the use of these tools. So if you understand education and you're an expert in AI, hey, there's a consulting opportunity for you right now, right? So, but I guess that sort of takes us back to those policy questions, right? ([Time 0:19:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/24576377-6af2-4204-9616-18f3cf87fec0)) - **Explore AI Tools Proactively** - Experiment with AI tools to understand their capabilities and usages. - Learn about AI's applications to gain valuable skills for your career advancement. Transcript: Kevin Metcalf I mean, I would say, you know, experiment with the tools. If you haven't done it before, you know, if if you're not sure how they can be used, you can even ask the tools. Hey, how do I use you? You know, what kinds of things are you useful for? You know, just because you're not in school doesn't mean you shouldn't, you know, take the time to learn about this stuff. And, you know, the, the more, you know, about how these things can be utilized in your career, whatever that happens to be. I mean, that that's gold when it comes to looking for that, you know, next position that you want to get to. ([Time 0:26:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c183811a-f8e0-43ac-a459-c8568c648f7f))