Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

I’ve been teaching in higher education for 30 years and am soon retiring. I teach math. In every math course there is massive amounts of cheating on everything that is graded that is not proctored in a classroom setting. Locking down browsers and whatnot does not prevent cheating.

The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class. The only solution I see is the Higher Learning Commission mandating this for all classes.

But even requiring in person proctored exams is not the full solution. Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass. And that work is increasingly cheating. It’s a clusterfuck. I have calculus students who don’t know how to work with fractions. If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated.

K-12 needs to be changed as well.

> Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass.

Can you blame students for optimizing for grades rather than "learning"? My first two years of undergrad, the smallest professor-led lecture course I took had at least 200 students (the largest was an econ 101 course that literally had 700 kids in it). We had smaller discussion sections as well, but those were led by TAs who were often only a couple years older than me. It was abundantly clear that my professors couldn't care less about me, let alone whether I "learned" anything from them. The classes were merely a box they were obligated to check. Is it so hard to understand why students would act accordingly?