“Under the Gun”
- 6 hours ago
- 3 min read
By Mark Abdon
These days, I find myself nostalgic for old-fashioned cheating. I miss when students would have to exert some effort to avoid actually doing their own work. Plagiarizing Locke and hoping no one will notice. Last year’s Anatomy and Physiology final exam, passed down to the new pledges of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. Better yet – get your pledge to take the test for you in a 300-person lecture hall. Who will know?
***
The young woman folds in half, holding her face in her hands. Her shoulders shake for a moment. When she rights herself, I hand her a tissue. Her eyelashes are clumped together – the same ones she loads up with mascara on game days. The same ones she batted in my direction moments ago in hopes that I might look the other way. No dice.
“Look, it’s your first offense, right?”
She says nothing, nods.
“Then I think you’ll be okay. Your name goes on a list, though, and if you’re caught a second time, that’s a meeting with the dean and automatic failure of the course. Understand?”
Nods again. She gets up to leave, but before she does, she gives me a mournful look, a broken bird, an injured doe. I’ve shot her. I am the hunter in this analogy.
I offer one more tissue.
***
Now it’s all too easy. Maybe more students are cheating than not; I don’t know. A study from The Journal of College Student Development found that 54% of college students are using AI for their writing assignments. 10% admitted to using it deliberately to cheat. Other studies posit this figure to be 2-3 times higher. Which actually matches plagiarism rates in the 90’s. So much for nostalgia, I guess.
Truth be told, that’s not what I feel strongest anyway. Battered by bouts of anger here and there, more often I simply find myself sad. Sad for the students who are finding new ways to circumvent the development of critical thinking skills, whose prefrontal cortexes will solidify in just a few years. Like bones that don’t have near enough calcium to carry them through this jarring, knock-down life.
Integrity takes a hit too.
***
The man-child in front of me plays linebacker. Twice my size. He’s not going down easy.
“I didn’t use AI.” He grips the chair hard. Veins pop in his forearms.
“So, you wrote this?” I gesture to the screen where I’ve highlighted a sentence with two semicolons, perfectly placed commas, and the word ‘indiscriminate’.
“Yes.” His anger pulls his head down and his shoulders inward – as if to pounce.
“How?” I keep my voice even. Calm. “Tell me about your writing process.”
His eyes narrow. He’s mad. For a moment I can picture him flipping my desk and storming out. Or maybe he’ll lie in wait. Maybe he’ll strike back in the anonymous end-of-semester course evaluations. Evaluations that my Department Chair will read. Effective, even if language isn’t his forte. Wounding with words. He is the hunter in this analogy.
***
I hate the way it has changed the nature of the teacher-student relationship. I used to think about it as mentorship. Or even servanthood. I am here to grow my students in character as well as intellect. Now I play detective.
Did this student copy and paste from AI? Did this student accept every Grammarly suggestion until I can no longer recognize their voice? Did this student do something even more malicious – generate a text in AI software and then reformulate it in their own words? Do I have enough evidence to indict? Convict? And then what? What of our relationship? At best, bruised. At worst, we are now enemies. I have ruined their academic standing. It would be natural to hate me. Now we are all hunters.
***
And where do we go from here? What governing body will speak for all teachers and all students? Or maybe natural selection will reign. Hunters and prey adapting to survive. Our tools will get better at detecting AI and their AI tools will get better at going undetected. No winners. Except for those who profit from this new environment where the only law is survival of the fittest.
I’ve got a few minutes between classes. I drop my textbooks for Advanced Writing and pick up a few others. As I do, I hear a familiar voice coming from my colleague’s office next door. I can’t hear her eyelashes batting, but one can assume. I close the door to my own office, and when I turn around, there she is. Tears run down her face, but now who has a tissue?
Mark Abdon hails from Indianapolis, Indiana where he teaches Creative Writing at Indiana Wesleyan University. His stories are popping up in places like The Pinch Journal, Catamaran, X-R-A-Y, Chautauqua and others. He also reads for Harvard Review.
