As I was chatting with an online group of which I am pleased to be a member, the topic of cheating in academic contexts came up. A number of those in the group are or have been involved in education as a profession, and a larger number have degrees at the undergraduate and graduate levels, so it’s something no few members of the group had experienced in one form or another; as I write this, nobody had admitted to engaging in the practice, but we’d all seen it and its effects. And so I got to thinking about my experience with cheating in and around the classroom.

I’ve not hidden the fact that I used to teach a technical writing class at Oklahoma State University. Given institutional demands, each section of that class taught there while I was engaged in that work followed a common set of assignments, of which one was the composition of a set of technical instructions. The assignment makes sense in the context, of course; a fair bit of technical writing is process documentation, whether as a descriptive thing or as an instructional aid, and most students took it reasonably seriously. They were able to see easily its application to their prospective careers, and many of them had had the experience of being given poor sets of directions, so they knew first-hand the annoyance of receiving them and were therefore inclined to do better than they had been done. (Maybe that’s a Platinum Rule: Do unto those better than they have done unto you. But that would be a decidedly different matter to treat than I mean to here.)

So much said, I did always have some smart-alec in the class, whether a student who claimed that the inclusion of new words into dictionaries represented the influence of “troublemakers” or one who decided to provide a detailed and richly-illustrated set of instructions for how to address some critter or another that was coming in to mess with crops or livestock. (That I had grown up in Central Texas was something I let my students know in most every class, and many classes also learned that my family comes from Midwestern farming stock. I don’t know why they thought it would be shocking to me, as seemed to be the case. Ah, well.) And I always had one or more who thought they’d be able to find some process with which I was presumably unfamiliar and simply copy others’ work as their own.

Cheating long predates AI, as the online discussion acknowledged.

One of those last sort of students was a woman I’ll call Trig. In class, Trig presented herself as a much put-upon wife and mother, struggling to earn her own education while caring for one child and pregnant with another while her husband worked long hours away from home in the oilfields. It was a common enough thing, to be sure, and while I sometimes found her in-class comments annoying, it was usually the kind of annoyance stemming from I-just-answered-this-question-for-another-student-why-didn’t-you-listen rather than from some deeper thing. For the most part, I found her pleasant enough to deal with, and although her first major assignment wasn’t done spectacularly well, it was solid and reasonably good. I’m sure an employer would be reasonably pleased to receive it in the workplace, or work on that level of performance.

On the technical instructions, though, Trig decided that she, like many others who sat for that class with me when I taught it, would address herself to firearms. (Maybe they did understand that I grew up in Central Texas and thought the topic would be near and dear to my heart, those students. Trig, though, was not among them, I think.) She decided that she would break down the process of cleaning a sidearm, some model of Sig Sauer pistol or another. (It’s been a few years since I taught the class; some details fade over time even without me eliding others, such as the student’s name or enough information to identify her.) The topic didn’t attract undue attention from me; again, I knew where I was, and it was a common enough thing for a student to address. Nor was it particularly rare for me to see usage errors in the piece as I sat to read and review it. But it was odd to see duplicated periods and some specific comma-splice errors, things I’d not seen Trig have problems with on previous assignments, major or minor.

At that point, I selected a passage from Trig’s instructions, copying them and pasting them into a search–and, lo and behold! they turned up as coming from the arms-maker’s own online documentation, usage errors and all! So did the rest of Trig’s instructions, as reading the two documents side-by-side showed in short order.

Now, I’d already had some experience with grade appeals and the like at the institution, so I knew 1) there were eyes on my classrooms and 2) I had better be sure to follow policy. Fortunately, policy was pretty clear on the matter at that point, and I followed it, documenting everything I’d done, pulling down copies of Trig’s submission and her uncited source materials, and filling out the requisite paperwork. A facilitator was assigned to the case, and a meeting with that facilitator, Trig, and me soon happened.

Trig, as might be expected, disclaimed having plagiarized. She led off with pathos, reminding me and telling the facilitator of her home situation and claiming that she would never do such a thing, that I must be persecuting her somehow because of the differences in our beliefs. She also remarked that “there’s only one way to clean this gun,” and that I should know that.

I was aware of that, as it happened; like I said, Trig wasn’t the first to write on that topic for me. She also wasn’t the first to be sloppy in her copy-work, which I pointed out. “It’s got the same comma-splice errors,” I said, pointing to them on the printouts. “And the same double periods.”

It was at that point the facilitator closed his file folder and turned to Trig, telling her what she’d won: a notation on her transcript for having failed the course due to plagiarism, the inability to withdraw from the class for the term then in progress (thus ensuring the mark wasn’t subsumed by dropping the course), and a requirement to sit for a one course-hour academic honesty seminar for regular cost but no credit. I wasn’t “happy to ruin [Trig’s] life,” as I got screamed at me as Trig left the room; I’d’ve rather not had to deal with any of it. But I also couldn’t let the lie–and poorly-told–slide. I don’t know that I could now, and I’ve mellowed out quite a bit in my old age.

I am aware that the use of so-called generative AI presents issues of cheating far different and far harder to identify and prove than Trig’s little trip. I know that, while the pap it spits out after scraping other people’s work (including possibly this very commentary) and recombining it sounds somehow like every other piece, the word-choice and -order are likely largely new. I know that it “knows” enough to throw in citations, even if those citations are themselves hallucinatory, having less grounding in reality even than Asimov’s thiotimoline. I know about a great many of the problems involved in addressing the fraud of students presenting AI-spewing off as their own work, and I do not envy those who have to deal with them–especially since there is less and less extrinsic incentive to rebuke AI-vomit and more and more to simply let it, and the students who do it, pass.

As I noted to my online group on at least one occasion, it’s probably a good thing I’m more or less out of academe anymore, painful as it still is to have made my exit.

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