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.

My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy.

As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. If the cost of not getting an A is exclusion from future opportunities- then students will reject exclusion by taking easier classes or cheating.

As someone who studied physics and came out with a 2.7 GPA due to studying what I wanted (the hard classes) and not cheating (as I did what I wanted) - I can say that there are consequences to this approach.

In my opinion, the solution is to reduce the reliance on assessments which are prone to cheating or which in the real world would be done by computer.

> My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy.

I agree with the first part, but I think the second follows from it.

Take a class like organic chemistry. When I was in school, the grade was based on 5 exams, each worth 20% of your grade. Worse still, anything less than an A was seen as a failure for most students dreaming of medical/vet school.

Of course you are going to have people that are going to cheat. You've made the stakes so high that the consequences of getting caught cheating are meaningless.

On top of that, once enough students are cheating, you need to cheat just to keep up.

The consequences of cheating could be made much more severe.

I am troubled by this argument because it suggests people have no ethical core. If that is true then we are going to have problems with them regardless.