EYDER PERALTA, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Eyder Peralta. This week here in Mexico, about 58,000 students are having to retake the entrance exam for the country's premier university, the National Autonomous University of Mexico. This time, it is in-person and supervised. The first time around, it was an at-home online test for the first time ever. But when experts reviewed results, they found huge statistical anomalies. The only explanation, they said, was massive cheating. The scandal got us thinking about how universities are teaching the concept of academic integrity now.
Tricia Bertram Gallant is director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California, San Diego. She's author of multiple books on ethics, including "The Opposite Of Cheating: Teaching For Integrity In The Age of AI." She joins us now. Welcome.
TRICIA BERTRAM GALLANT: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
PERALTA: So, Tricia, tens of thousands of students suspected of cheating on the same exam. Does this surprise you?
BERTRAM GALLANT: No. No. I mean, I'm assuming these were 17-year-olds, 18...
PERALTA: Yeah.
BERTRAM GALLANT: ...Year-olds, maybe. Think about 17-, 18-year-old you. And imagine having artificial intelligence at the tip of your fingers and taking an extremely high-stakes exam that you perceive as either making or breaking your future. Would you be able to resist that temptation?
PERALTA: I mean, I would hope so, right?
BERTRAM GALLANT: I don't know. I mean, humans - we're not very good at long-term thinking, you know? We're kind of really good at solving the problem facing us. And the problem facing me right now is I've got to do well on this exam because this is so important to my entire life.
PERALTA: Do you think that that's what's happening more broadly in this - I guess what we can call a cheating epidemic?
BERTRAM GALLANT: Well, we have no stats to show it's a cheating epidemic.
PERALTA: OK.
BERTRAM GALLANT: What we're actually seeing is, for the most part, when students misuse AI, it's kind of just replaced plagiarism. People have always cheated, but we do do so more when there's more temptations and opportunities. I would joke with my students that - because I was an undergrad before the internet. And I said, if I wanted to cheat, I had to, you know, go to the library and handwrite copies from textbooks, or I had to ask somebody to sit next to me during an exam so I could cheat off of them. So the conditions are very different, but humans aren't.
PERALTA: Interesting. So it sounds like what you're saying is that maybe the way that students see academic integrity and intellectual honesty today might not be so different than they did a decade ago.
BERTRAM GALLANT: Right. So humans like to be efficient, so we look for shortcuts to ease the pain of things we don't like doing. So that's always been the condition. What has changed - right? - beyond the AI is university's more expensive, so it feels like you can't explore and make mistakes and fail because it will just cost way too much money.
PERALTA: So the cheating in schools today - I mean, like you said, it's not copying off each other or going to the library. How has AI specifically exacerbated the problem?
BERTRAM GALLANT: So the problem with chatbots - let's not just say AI because that is a very broad umbrella term. But these general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini are sycophantic, and they are designed to keep people addicted to depending on them. And so a student might go to use AI for a very legitimate reason. You know, I went to a lecture this week. I really don't understand what the professor was saying. So I'm just gonna ask Gemini to explain it to me at a Grade-8 level or in my native language. That's OK.
Or maybe I get the assignment, and I say, oh my gosh. I can't decide. Am I going to write about this topic or this topic? And so I ask ChatGPT, and then ChatGPT says, you know, you should think about this or this. And do you want me to write the first three pages for you? So those prompts - that invitation to cheat, that enticement to offload - is very different than in the past. My books didn't yell at me to plagiarize them.
PERALTA: You're taking a much more generous view than, say, the people here in Mexico took. People here in Mexico were really angry at the students. They were saying that this was a generational problem. We never did that in our day.
BERTRAM GALLANT: (Laughter).
PERALTA: You're saying it's much more complicated.
BERTRAM GALLANT: I mean, I think we should be upset about it - that these chatbots exist to shortcut learning. And we should be upset that this system has encouraged students to do whatever it takes to get ahead.
PERALTA: So, Tricia, what are some solutions?
BERTRAM GALLANT: Well, I think secure assessments. There's multiple ways you can do that - flipped, engaged, active-learning classrooms - right? - where the students are doing the assessments in the class with their peers, with their instructor rather than watching lectures in class and doing the assessments outside of class. Internships - right? - co-ops, apprenticeships. Those are all good ways to do supervised assessment as well.
PERALTA: Tricia Bertram Gallant is director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California, San Diego and author of multiple books on scholarly ethics, including "The Opposite Of Cheating: Teaching For Integrity In The Age Of AI." Tricia, thank you for joining us.
BERTRAM GALLANT: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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