I once believed university was a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated

What should professors do about AI generated papers? When I returned to teaching from a sabbatical last year I noticed that the students in my general education history classes suddenly learned how to write. Were they using ChatGPT to write their essays on Thomas Paine and Frederick Douglass? Probably. As a professor who believes that part of my job is to make students better writers, I didn’t know how to respond to this. I did not have the time to try to figure out whether these students were submitting AI generated papers. So I punted. To use University of California philosophy professor Troy Jollimore’s words, I “turned a blind eye to it” and gave “every paper the benefit of the doubt, no matter how unlikely it might be that it was written by a human hand.” There were just going to be some students, as Jollimore writes, who want to “make it through college unaltered, unscathed. To be precisely the same person at graduation, and after, as they were on the first day they arrived on campus. As if the whole experience had never really happened at all.”

Jollimore’s recent piece at The Walrus, as depressing as it is, has forced me to think more deeply about all of this. Here is a taste:

I could, of course, turn a blind eye to it and give every paper the benefit of the doubt, no matter how unlikely it might be that it was written by a human hand. I could say, as some of my colleagues do, that I trust all of my students, and that it is better to trust and sometimes be wrong than to be suspicious and right. I could go along with all of the people who have said to me: It’s not your job to force people to be virtuous. Let cheaters cheat. In the long run, they only hurt themselves, denying themselves the real education they could be gaining (and for which, after all, they or their parents are paying a fair bit of money).

This is a lovely set of thoughts, and it would make my life a good deal easier if I could bring myself to embrace it. But I can’t. (I’m an ethics professor, for crying out loud.) For one thing, while it is true that the cheaters are cheating themselves out of an education, it does not follow that they are harming only themselves. There is no getting around the fact that a central part of my job is deciding who passes and who fails. Some of my students still do write their own papers. They still do the readings. They want to learn. (And then there are those who don’t but have enough integrity that they follow the rules nonetheless.) My papers are hard to write, and the readings can be hard to understand; it’s philosophy, after all. These students are working. The effort they put in is real, and I appreciate and admire it.

It would be an egregious wrong to reward both sets of students equally, to force the honest students to compete for jobs, for scholarships, for admission to graduate schools on an equal footing with those who have “earned” their grades by submitting work that is not theirs.

Of course, should such cheating continue to be widespread, it seems inevitable that all college degrees will be worth a good deal less and will perhaps cease to offer any advantage at all. But this outcome is surely of little comfort to those willing to work for their degrees, those who want those degrees to continue to be worth something and to mean something.

And this:

But let’s pretend, for a moment, that it’s true: students who cheat harm only themselves. Even though I am certainly angry at those students who choose to cheat, the fact is that I also care about them and feel a certain degree of compassion for them. I don’t want them to miss out on the opportunity to become educated, not even as the result of their own poor choices.

It’s a bit of a Catch-22. How can we expect them to make good choices, about their studies or anything else, if they have not yet been given the tools to think critically? How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more? Or, worse, to see it as bearing no value at all, as if it were a kind of confidence trick, an elaborate sham?

My life, like anyone’s, could have gone in a lot of different directions. As it happens, I was lucky enough to end up majoring in a subject—philosophy—that I love, and whose pursuit has allowed me to enjoy the benefits of genuine learning. So I am in a position to know and appreciate what a difference education makes to the quality of your life. The vastness of the world it opens up to you while simultaneously instilling in you the curiosity to explore it. The sense of perspective it offers, enabling you to view the events of your life, and the events of whatever historical moment it is yours to live through, in a much larger context, rather than being resigned to viewing them from a standpoint of uncomprehending ignorance, as if they were all happening for the first time and for no discernible reason.

The fact is, I want my students, all of them, to have that kind of experience, to have the opportunity to live that kind of life. I don’t want them to be cheated out of it. I don’t want this, even if they themselves are the ones they are cheating….

Read the entire piece here.