Zak's Weekly Musings (January 11, 2023)

Who is Scared of Chat GPT? Not Us!

Chat GPT is the natural language processing technology that has launched a thousand thinkpieces, with some of the more dire prognostications predicting the end of various aspects of the education system as we know it. From English class to homework to college admissions essays, Chat GPT has been characterized as delivering a deathblow to these entrenched and familiar educational practices. It's understandable that the emergence of Chat GPT has sparked speculation of this sort, but the hysteria around its emergence has truly reached its most histrionic peaks when it comes to cheating and plagiarism.

It’s not unreasonable for us to have questions about how Chat GPT may change how we detect and monitor cheating. It’s also quite natural for us to harbor some unease in the face of such rapid technological advancement. However, we cannot allow suppositional fears and our own discomfort to hold us back from realizing Chat GPT’s immense and positive potential. 

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be chatting more about how we can leverage Chat GPT for productive purposes. But, I don’t want to put the cart before the horse. This week, let’s address (and hopefully quell) the concerns we have Chapt GPT sparking some sort of cheating epidemic (something that educators 100 years ago feared would be a consequence of the radio, FYI). 

To do so, I want to share an excerpt from Alfie Kohn’s 2007 article, Who’s Cheating Whom? The article will help remind us that students need motive, means, and opportunity if they’re going to cheat. With Chat GPT, they have the means. But, according to the research, that shouldn’t be enough to compel them to cheat in a progressive learning environment. 

Enjoy! 

A fair amount of research has accumulated since the publication of that report to illuminate the situations in which students are most likely to cheat and to help us understand the reasons they do so. We’ve learned, first of all, that when teachers don’t seem to have a real connection with their students, or when they don’t seem to care much about them, students are more inclined to cheat.[5]  That’s a very straightforward finding, and not a particularly surprising one, but if taken seriously it has the effect of shifting our attention and reshaping the discussion.

So, too, does a second finding:  Cheating is more common when students experience the academic tasks they’ve been given as boring, irrelevant, or overwhelming.  In two studies of ninth and tenth graders, for example, “Perceived likelihood of cheating was uniformly relatively high . . . when a teacher’s pedagogy was portrayed as poor.”[6]  To put this point positively, cheating is relatively rare in classrooms where the learning is genuinely engaging and meaningful to students and where a commitment to exploring significant ideas hasn’t been eclipsed by a single-minded emphasis on “rigor.”  The same is true in “democratic classes where [students’] opinions are respected and welcomed.”[7]   List the classroom practices that nourish a disposition to find out about the world, the teaching strategies that are geared not to covering a prefabricated curriculum but to discovering the significance of ideas, and you will have enumerated the conditions under which cheating is much less likely to occur.   (Interestingly, one of the mostly forgotten findings from that old Teachers College study was that “progressive school experiences are less conducive to deception than conventional school experiences” – a result that persisted even after the researchers controlled for age, IQ, and family background.   In fact, the more time students spent in either a progressive school or a traditional school, the greater the difference between the two in terms of cheating.)[8]

Third, “when students perceive that the ultimate goal of learning is to get good grades, they are more likely to see cheating as an acceptable, justifiable behavior,” as one group of researchers summarized their findings in 2001.[9] Cheating is particularly likely to flourish if schools use honor rolls and other incentives to heighten the salience of grades, or if parents offer financial inducements for good report cards[10] — in other words, if students are not merely rewarded for academic success, but are also rewarded for being rewarded.

Grades, however, are just the most common manifestation of a broader tendency on the part of schools to value product more than process, results more than discovery, achievement more than learning.   If students are led to focus on how well they’re doing more than on what they’re doing, they may do whatever they think is necessary to make it look as though they’re succeeding. Thus, a recent study of more than 300 students in two California high schools confirmed that the more classrooms drew attention to students’ academic performance, the more students “observed and engaged in various types of cheating.”[11]

The goal of acing a test, getting a good mark, making the honor roll, or impressing the teacher is completely different from – indeed, antithetical to – the goal of figuring out what makes some objects float and some sink or why the character in that play we just read is so indecisive.  When you look at the kind of schooling that’s all about superior results and “raising the bar,” you tend to find a variety of unwelcome consequences:[12]  less interest in learning for its own sake, less willingness to take on challenging tasks (since the point is to produce good results, not to take intellectual risks), more superficial thinking . . . and more cheating.

That is exactly what Eric Anderman, a leading expert on the subject, and his colleagues have found.  In a 1998 study of middle school students, those who “perceived that their schools emphasized performance [as opposed to learning] goals were more likely to report engaging in cheating behaviors.”  Six years later, he turned his attention to the transition from eighth to ninth grade and looked at the culture of individual classrooms. The result was essentially the same: More cheating took place when teachers emphasized good grades, high test scores, and being smart.   There was less cheating when they made it clear that the point was to enjoy the learning, when understanding mattered more than memorizing, and when mistakes were accepted as a natural result of exploration.[13] Interestingly, these studies found that even students who acknowledged that it’s wrong to cheat were more likely to do so when the school culture placed a premium on results.