AI is “simply a tool that enables us not to have to think for ourselves,” says a student in a recent article in The 74.
That attitude is helping to kill trust between teachers and students, according to the article. When students cheaply and easily outsource their work, why value a teacher’s feedback? And when teachers who rely on sometimes unreliable AI-detection software believe their students are taking major shortcuts, the trust factor erodes further.
Research suggests a shakeup is coming in student-teacher relationships. AI is forcing teachers to rethink how they think about students, assessments and learning itself.
AI has already made school more transactional, said one student, with the desire to learn replaced by simply completing assignments for many students. “The incentive system for students is to just get points,” he said in an interview.
How AI affects student-teacher relationships is just beginning to be studied. One 2024 study found that many students were beginning to feel AI technology was testing the trust they felt from instructors, in many cases diminishing it — even if they didn’t rely on AI.
Many students said instructors trusted them and would give them the benefit of the doubt in suspected AI cheating cases, but others were surprised when accused.
Damaged trust has some students working on assignments defensively. One student complained that their instructor now implicitly trusted AI plagiarism detectors “more than she trusts us.”
It’s creating this situation of mutual distrust and suspicion, and it makes nobody like each other.
The biggest problem is that AI detectors simply aren’t that reliable, said one researcher. One example: they are more likely to flag the papers of English language learners as being written by AI. These biases in the AI detectors can put a seed of doubt in the instructor’s mind, according to the researcher.
Liz Shulman, an English teacher at Evanston Township High School near Chicago, assumes students are going to use AI work arounds. “It is an enormous wedge in the relationship,” she said.
Since 2020’s long COVID lockdowns, students have recalibrated their expectations. It’s less relational and “much more transactional,” she says.
Accounts of teachers resigned to students cheating with AI are “concerning” and contrast with research emphasizing the importance of teacher agency, says Brooke Stafford-Brizard, senior vice president for Innovation and Impact at the Carnegie Foundation.
“Education is a deeply social process,” Stafford-Brizard says. “Teaching and learning are social, and schools are social, and so everyone contributing to those can rely on that science of relational trust, the science of relationships. We can pull from that as intentionally as we pull from the science of reading.”
One researcher says generative AI presents an old challenge: How to understand and prevent cheating. Research identifies four reasons why students cheat: 1) They don’t understand the relevance of an assignment to their life; 2) they’re under time pressure; 3) they’re intimidated by its high stakes; or 4) they don’t feel equipped to succeed.
Teachers can lessen the number of shortcuts by figuring out how to intrinsically motivate students to study by helping them connect with the material for its own sake. They can help students see how an assignment will help them succeed in a future career and they can design courses that prioritize deeper learning and competence.
Teachers can make assignments more low-stakes and break them into smaller pieces to ease testing pressure. Give students more opportunities in the classroom to practice the skills and review the knowledge being tested is another suggestion.
Talking openly about academic honesty and the ethics of cheating is key. If you approach assignments that way, you don’t always have to be the police,” says one teacher. Students are “more incentivized, just by the system, to not cheat.”
Despite these tactics, trust can still be an issue in the AI age. One student says his new English teacher expects all assignments to come in hand-written. But he notes some teachers use ChatGPT for class presentations. It can be obvious because students now are AI experts. “There was a palpable feeling of distrust in the room,” he says.
The 74
