Colleges crack down on use of AI in classrooms after dozens of cheating students reported

College professors across the country are working to “ChatGPT-proof” their assignments after educators reported “dozens” of cheating students.

Timothy Main, a writing professor at Conestoga College in Canada, said the amount of academic integrity issues he’s noted in the most recent semester rose from eight to 57, according to Fox News.

Main is now reworking his freshman writing courses to try to prevent AI involvement. He plans to give students strict warnings about the use of AI and ask them to write about their own subjective experiences, opinions and perspectives.

Other professors, such as Bonnie MacKellar, a computer science professor at St. John’s University in New York City, are planning to shift back to paper-based tests. MacKellar is going to require her students to handwrite their computer codes. Paper assignments, she said, will count for a higher percentage of their grade.

MacKellar worries students using AI are cheating themselves out of valuable lessons and won’t have the necessary skills for upper-level classes. 

Bill Hart-Davidson, associate dean in Michigan State University’s College of Arts and Letters, is leading AI workshops to help professors create new assignments and classroom policies for the coming semester.

“Asking students questions like, ‘Tell me in three sentences what is the Krebs cycle in chemistry?’ That’s not going to work anymore, because ChatGPT will spit out a perfectly fine answer to that question,” Davidson said according to Fortune.  

Instead, Davidson suggests giving students material that has errors in it and asking them to point out the mistakes.  

On the other side, some students are expressing worry about being accused of using AI even if they haven’t.  

Sophomore Nathan LeVang says he’s now doublechecking all his assignments through an AI detector before turning them in. In one case, the AI detector flagged one of his paragraphs in a 2,000-word essay he’d written as 78% AI generated.  

“I was like, that is definitely not true because I just sat here and wrote it word for word,” LeVang said according to Fortune. He rewrote the paragraph, then ran it through the detector again.  

“If it takes me 10 minutes after I write my essay to make sure everything checks out, that’s fine. It’s extra work, but I think that’s the reality we live in.” 

A BestColleges survey showed approximately 1 in 5 students admitted to using AI to complete an assignment or exam. More than half said their instructors have not openly discussed the use of AI tools in the classroom.