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.

I have friends that started a startup trying to tackle this problem. They actually found ways for certain types of exams in certain subjects to make cheating exponentially harder and also provide less of an advantage, so much so that if the student is cheating they are effectively learning.

Some of their stuff works really well, and they have prof customers who love it. The CEO went on a tour to visit their biggest customers in person and several of them said they couldn't imagine going back.

Unfortunately as a whole the industry is not interested in it, aside from a few small niches and department heads who are both open minded and actually care about the integrity of the education. There have even been cases where profs want it and the dean or admin in charge of academic integrity vetoes its adoption. I've been privy to some calls I can only characterize as corrupt.

There is something deeply broken about higher Ed, the economics, the culture of the students, the culture of the faculty, the leadership... This isn't an AI problem it's a society problem.

When the students genuinely want to learn something and they are there for the knowledge, not the credit, cheating isn't a problem.