AI, Cheating, and Trusting Students to be Human

If you follow the conversations about higher education on social media or in the news, a primary topic on people’s minds is the impact of artificial intelligence on the purposes and processes of an education.For better or worse, much of the focus has been on cheating: Are students outsourcing their work, and their learning, to tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini? Some high-profile stories have gone so far as to suggest cheating is so rampant that the whole college system is basically collapsing around us.Tricia Bertram Gallant, coauthor of the new book The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI, helps us put these claims into context, providing insights into the deeper questions that we should be asking about academic dishonesty and integrity and sharing pedagogical strategies for adapting to AI’s widespread availability.Key Topics Discussed:Why students cheat (spoiler: the reasons aren’t new)The role of “neutralizing,” or moral justifications, in allowing people to view cheating as bad in the abstract but not in their current situationNot putting the burden to intuit the purpose of an assignment on studentsHow AI has changed cheating, but not why students do itExperimenting with AI tools so you can create guardrails for students—and why doing so doesn’t mean you think less of them as peopleStrategies for communicating effectively with students about generative AIRethinking when, why, and how writing is assigned, including the benefits of having students complete some of that work in the classroomThe potential of pairing written exams with oral assessments—which it turns out students often appreciateHow Tricia suggests instructors react when suspecting a student has cheatedGuest Bio: Tricia Bertram Gallant is the director of the Academic Integrity Office and Triton Testing Center at the University of California San Diego. President emeritus of the International Center for Academic Integrity, she has more than 20 years of experience as an academic integrity researcher, author, teacher, and practitioner.Her fifth book, The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI, which she co-authored with David Rettinger, was published this March. It is part of the Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Ed Series at the University of Oklahoma Press edited by Designed for Learning host Jim Lang and Michelle Miller.Resources Mentioned:Book: The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI (University of Oklahoma Press)Tricia’s Podcast and Contact Info: theoppositeofcheating.comNotre Dame Learning’s Lab for AI in Teaching and Learning (LAITL)Notre Dame’s Undergraduate Academic Code of HonorEpisode TranscriptDesigned for Learning is hosted by Jim Lang, a professor of the practice in Notre Dame Learning’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence and the author of several influential books on teaching. The podcast is produced by Notre Dame Learning’s Office of Digital Learning. For more, visit learning.nd.edu/podcast. You can also follow Notre Dame Learning on LinkedIn.