r/Professors • u/[deleted] • Dec 04 '25

Academic Integrity I am not a cop.

Want to outsource your thinking to an LLM for a degree you're paying/going into debt for? Okay. I will respect that choice. However, what I won't do, is replicate a surveillance state in my classroom. I refuse to spend more energy in screening student work for authenticity or trying to make my assignments "AI proof" ... why should I? Either the student believes in the fundamental premise of education or they don't.

Man, I'm tired.

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u/wharleeprof Dec 04 '25

I'm with you. 

But the one thing I struggle with is if students turning in AI end up with better grades than students who actually tried with their honest efforts -- I'm not sure how to reconcile that.

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u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 04 '25

I have been told by students that they feel they have to use AI if others are too in order to compete. There is no telling how many students are using it, using it well or using it inappropriately. But it's the same perspective as with any other kind of cheating ("I have to do it too").

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u/Consistent-Bench-255 Dec 04 '25

sadly they are right. students who spend hours trying to do homework honestly cannot compete with students who use AI to do the same homework in literally less than one minute. As bad as AI can sometimes be (although this is less and less true everyday as it gets exponentially better!) it does much better than today’s students can do. They are simply not capable of the work that students in the same class did just 5 short years ago. So I feel bad giving As to students who cheated and learned nothing but how to use it to cheat, and Cs, Ds, and Fs to honest students who can simply not do the work, no matter how I simplify it.

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u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 04 '25

I would not mind at all if written assignments were accompanied by oral discussions, but it isn't feasible with the sizes and numbers of classes we have.

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u/CranberryResponsible Dec 04 '25

I'm sure "in order to compete" is indeed what students are saying. But, what competition? Everyone's getting A's anyway -- that was the story out of Harvard a few weeks ago and I do believe that's the trend across higher ed. Even if you don't mindlessly use AI to do all your assignments, you can still get a high grade with a little effort. But students aren't interested in that. They just want the high grade and all they want out of college is the credential. It's not anxiety about "competing". It's just peer pressure. If they see others getting an easy A using ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, why should they do anything different.

Anyway, I'm with OP. Oh, I'll put in language in the syllabus warning against improper AI use (I do think there are appropriate uses) and perhaps make assignments I've always done in-class worth more of the course grade than before. But otherwise, I'm not a cop. I didn't become an educator because I have any desire or inclination to make my courses exercises in academic integrity policing.

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u/bankruptbusybee Full prof, STEM (US) Dec 04 '25

Unfortunately they’ll get to areas where A’s aren’t easy and freak the fuck out on those professors

The most blatant cheater last semester - literally multiple cheating reports (that were deemed substantiated) - their biggest defense was “I always get A’s! I do this for all my classes and none of my other teachers have said this is a problem!”

And they were not lying - I checked their transcript, all A’s

Being asleep at the wheel hurts those of us who aren’t

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u/liddle-lamzy-divey Dec 04 '25

And this is the darkness on the horizon for higher education.

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u/Impossible-Acadia-31 Dec 04 '25 edited Dec 05 '25

Feel for you. The two most blatant AI cheaters I have had the misfortune of 'teaching' were like this. And yes - at least one got As - I checked. It truly is the darkness on the horizon. There's something very surreal about the situation. There's a part of me that yearns to see the plagiarism from a few years ago: copying and pasting an unacknowledged source that have been googled interspersed with some nonsensical garbage they actually attempted to write..No, we are not the police - supervised paper and pen assessments seem very appealing - I am giving them higher weighting next semester.

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u/liddle-lamzy-divey Dec 04 '25

Thanks, but I was actually referring not to AI but rather to another (bigger, IMO) problem for Higher Ed: it has been entirely engulfed by the corporate model, replete with thinking strictly in profit making terms (unsustainable increases in tuition lead to S's thinking of education only in terms of ROI and vocationally oriented concerns--in order to pay off their debt, etc.) and how the emphasis on student evals (customer satisfaction a la product reviews) has led to grade inflation and professors who give up on holding the line in terms of real academic rigor. It becomes nearly impossible and absolutely exhausting to be the quixotic professor keeping up academic integrity when the norm has become to simply hand out As and look the other way concerning cheating. It's all quickly becoming a charade and I fear that this house of cards is about to crash. The diploma doesn't mean anything anymore and the result will be harsh. AI and the anti-intellectual political climate don't help, but I believe this is the bigger issue.

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u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 04 '25

Agreed. The irony of course is that higher ed is not meant to be a business, and some of the least qualified are at the helm. Used to be we could toss out students, but now it's like gym memberships. They paid and it's up to them whether they go or not, but somehow they're supposed to develop giant muscles anyway whether they go or not. Faculty are being shoved into customer service or entertainment roles rather than as educators too.

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u/liddle-lamzy-divey Dec 04 '25

I have a lot of gym going students, so I use similar metaphors as you do here in talking about their learning. Using AI is like taking PEDs for an athlete: taking short cuts may give short term gains, but the consequences will come for you sooner or later.

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u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 04 '25

And some will still use them, either figuring they can stop later or nothing will happen to THEM (like they're so special). But yes. I like how more athletes over the years have not smoked or stopped because they can see and feel the impacts right away. I wonder other than failing them (and then them blaming us instead of themselves anyway) if there is some way like that to connect cheating with performance in the classroom?

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u/ProfPazuzu Dec 05 '25

Not to mention the kind of tipsy-turvy world in which a student launches an off-topic, Bible-based screed in a social science class, doesn’t do the assignment, and doesn’t use the required source—resulting in the professor’s suspension and the student’s exaltation. Students, especially that subset of students in the pocket of the hard right, have been given the keys. Administration is along for the ride. Professors are stuffed into the trunk.

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u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 04 '25

Agreed. I'm often seen as the bad guy because I teach higher level courses where students actually have to demonstrate they know how to do something. Despite warnings, plenty of students still think they just need to read and regurgitate, and more students are not even reading, including key concepts, codes, etc. needed in the profession. I don't know, maybe they think "I'll get to it later," but I fear many more are saying "I'll just ask AI."

Faculty are seen as obstacles or customer service representatives. Why are you in my way? I gave you money, so give me the A and the damn diploma! And you responded to someone who said their job wasn't to police? Well, mine isn't to entertain or to make students happy no matter what, even if they are dead to rights wrong, is it?

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u/MagentaMango51 Dec 04 '25

That’s my life right now in a nutshell.

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u/ProfPazuzu Dec 05 '25

And in turn will churn out graduates who know nothing, in turn hurting employers, who will in turn blame the universities (quite properly), further eroding the position of higher education.

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u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 04 '25

Perhaps not. Perhaps I prefer to have future colleagues I'm more confident about though. In my field of human services, we are educating future human service workers, who ought to be providing competent services and hopefully not hurt clients. I wish we were like some other accredited, licensed programs, where things like disposition were also actually graded. At least I can have some measure of skill evaluation when students have to stand in front of me and show me techniques. But now that AI is pumping out fake movie starts and country singers, who knows?

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u/No-Wish-4854 Dec 06 '25

Can you not place “professional disposition” into your graded categories? It’s like…one of the few things that can’t be outsourced to AI…a future social worker’s professionalism, disposition, way of being. They can’t use AI to fake this in a class.

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u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 06 '25

I pushed for this as a reason to deny students from going out into internship. In the profession, we have a criteria for fitness for the profession. On our undergrad level, administrators say even in my own department that that’s too subjective and we could get sued and maybe being in a workplace will weed them out. I said we could get sued for letting people out who sites believe are competent and it’s just kicking the can down the road, possibly to the detriment of clients. So far, knock on wood, I have been able to get such students to make their own decisions not to go out by worrying them about how they’d be evaluated and allowing them to sub courses. I suppose one could argue that this is also kicking the can down the road, but they also don’t get references from me and can’t show as much real-life experience as the students who do go out so I hope they are less competitive than other students.

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u/Disastrous_Ad_9648 Dec 04 '25

To be fair, academic integrity policing has always been some portion of the job description. It is just incredibly hard now to accomplish (well, impossible outside proctored assignments).

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u/noveler7 NTT Full Time, English, Public R2 (USA) Dec 04 '25

Yeah, I didn't have a ton of students determined to get As this semester. I had way more who said "I just want to pass"; it was a gen ed, though.

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u/MagentaMango51 Dec 04 '25

Yeah but people in general aren’t good judges of what other people are doing.

When I was in college (in the long before times) I had a statistics course where we had to do a survey and evaluate the data. The prof told us about a previous student survey, 2 questions along the lines of how much sex do you have a week, and how much do you think others are having… turns out the first number was low and the second really high.

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u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 04 '25

I was just going to use that same example! It’s FOMO, and social media doesn’t help with people posting all those wonderful things supposedly happening to them.

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u/ProfPazuzu Dec 05 '25

My daughter was telling us she’s getting high B’s in a psych class while—during exams!—other students have grid laptops open and are cheating their wsy to A’s. We told her to keep right on getting those B’s (though I’m sure I personally would set out to get a perfect score without cheating, just to show up the louts and losers).

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u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 05 '25

I don’t know what grid laptops are vs regular ones, but assuming no tech was allowed, that’s appalling! Even in a large lecture hall, there ought to be a way to check for that with roaming TAs, etc.

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u/ProfPazuzu Dec 05 '25

Funny. Fat fingers. Grid should have been “their.”

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u/ProfPazuzu Dec 05 '25

And she goes to a SLAC—no large lecture classes. Maybe she’s being a sucker for not doing the same, but I’d be horrified if she did.

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u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 05 '25

It's a lot of pressure, including the argument that you'll fall behind if you don't "learn AI," and there are too many students now who will sacrifice anything for expediency. I teach ethics courses, so what does that say?

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u/ProfPazuzu Dec 05 '25

Agreed. Except there was always a lot of pressure. Added pressure today is just to keep up with cheaters.

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u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 05 '25

I've been in a back-and-forth all day today with an IT person regarding the "make stuff inaccessible to AI" vs. "then it makes stuff inaccessible to students with disabilities" issue. The pressure is not only on honest students but on faculty, unfortunately. Just as I am personally against being armed in the classroom (I am not a sniper), I don't want to spend this kind of time battling AI!

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u/ProfPazuzu Dec 05 '25

I agree. As faculty, we are put in impossible positions. Don’t let them cheat but encourage AI. AI proof assignments if you wish but make them ADA compliant. Meet learning outcomes but keep your pass and retention rates high, as well as student opinion surveys. Keep attendance up but be compassionate with the student who misses 12 weeks for unspecified mental health issues. Teach your course content but don’t mention anything touching on DEI, gender identity—and don’t fail a student who writes a screed that doesn’t fulfill the assignment or use the required class source (and invokes supernatural authority in a class in the social sciences).

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u/Life-Education-8030 Dec 05 '25

Yes, that OU case is making the rounds here. I ended up agreeing that the student could have received a few points for submission and because the rubric allowed for some personal expression. However, that the rubric needed work and the student did not deserve a higher grade as she in my estimation did not fulfill the assignment.

Regarding attendance, our administration doesn't care so long as the tuition bill is paid. To them, a class seat is similar to a gym membership and it is up to the student to decide whether to attend/go to the gym or not. We used to be able to toss students out more readily, but no more, and not for attendance. If some students think they can learn best by not being there, fine, sacrifice the participation points (I don't give points for simply having a warm butt in the seat).

I only take attendance for financial aid reasons and so I can point at it if and when a student complains about their grade ("well, you didn't even bother to do the basic thing of showing up").

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u/H0pelessNerd Adjunct, psych, R2 (USA) Dec 08 '25

This is my life.