Teachers consistently identify cheating as a major concern amid the AI boom, but this concern is getting little recognition from states, according to a Chalkbeat report.
At least 13 states have passed laws about AI in education, but most direct state agencies and districts to create their own AI guidance. About three out of four states have published information to help guide AI use in education, but a Chalkbeat review found concrete steps to halt or deter students from offloading work to AI are largely missing. AI literacy and ways teachers can use AI for efficiency are more common types of guidance.
This leaves educators and districts to devise their own ways to deter and catch AI-enabled cheaters. It is a taxing endeavor that hasn’t yielded definitive solutions, according to educators and researchers.
Here are the unresolved issues:
- There is no current, definitive method to detect AI-generated content.
- There is no universal definition for cheating: Can students use AI to outline an essay but not write it? Can they use it to copy edit?
- Some states have issued acceptable use policies which address some, but not all, of these distinctions.
Most of the nation’s 10 largest school districts have or are developing specific policies to prevent using generative AI to cheat. But half of those districts explicitly discourage using AI detection tools.
Many district actions address the urgency of the problem without specifying how to address it, which could only exacerbate teachers’ anxiety about AI cheating.
“I think teachers feel like they ought to have a solution now that they don’t have,” says Justin Reich, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the host of a podcast about how AI is shaping K-12 education.
The District of Columbia and at least 37 states have issued recommendations for public schools about AI. But many documents give only a page or a few paragraphs to academic integrity. The absence of actual guidance is because there’s little evidence to show how effective AI tools are in the classroom, or what policies would effectively stop cheating, Reich says.
Schools in more than one-third of the states are told not to rely solely on tools that promise to detect the use of AI because studies show they are not effective and incorrect flag genuine student writing as AI.
Without hard and fast rules, teachers are requiring students to complete more graded work in class, using pencil and paper.
One teacher interviewed for the article said students were becoming more fluent in methods to cheat when she decided to leave the profession. They were finding tools like QuillBot to disguise AI-generated writing and make it sound more like student writing.
She’s open to going back to the classroom, if she gets more administrative support to help detect the kind of AI misconduct that seemed out of control when she left.
“As a community, we need a support network,” she says.
Chalkbeat
