There’s been a flurry of discussion ever since the release of chatGPT that attempts to address the burgeoning problem of plagiarism at universities and even high schools. The purported problem is that students are not merely using googled content verbatim to complete assignments, but are now using chatGPT to wholesale outsource their homework to AI tools.

With the release of GPT-4, the quality of AI-generated essays now rivals and often surpasses the abilities of the average college student – at least the ones who attended the classes I took during the pandemic. So now educators are grappling with a world where academic honesty has been turned upside down and are struggling to find ways to determine whether students have, in fact, written their own essays, thereby demonstrating they’ve mastered the time-honored process of reading a chapter from a mind-numbing textbook, posting a brief summary of same on an online discussion board, and then feigning interest in other students equally banal summaries of the same material.

Aside from the fact that such a methodology hardly passes for authentic intellectual discourse, the prospect that students might be tapping into AI to further reduce actual acquired knowledge and/or critical  thinking skills to near zero threatens the very foundation on which the higher-ed system was created.

Educators are scrambling to find alternative methods to verify that students are actually engaged in the learning process. Because if students can efficiently cheat the system, what is the value proposition of a college degree?