To start, let’s make it clear that cheating is not, ever, the way to reach a goal. Depriving yourself of the entire experience of acquiring knowledge or ability also decreases that thing’s relevance as you have taken the cowardly way out of improving yourself and sharing your improved self with others.
A college professor found out the extent of passive cheating when he presented the midterm exam to a class. Dr. Jason Gibson, the history professor at Alcorn State University in Lorman, Mississippi, was able to use a failsafe of his own design to catch 32 out of 35 students using AI to prepare their papers.
He used white text on the white background most commonly used in word processing, so it would not be seen by the students. The simple sentence instructed any possible AI program to include the term Madagascar in the finished product, even if it made no logical sense. This meant that students who input the entire document into an AI program unknowingly instructed the bot to include the word Madagascar. Worse, none of them bothered to read through the final paper before turning it in.
A fourth student (not one of the three in the class who actually did the work and did not receive a failing grade) had opted to use dark mode/black background with white text to do papers, so they saw the white text and, possibly believing it was a worth a bonus point, prepared their own sentence using Madagascar, and so was not penalized as their entry was original.
So these are the future of our world; students stepping out of their caps and gowns without having actually received the gift of knowledge for which their parents paid hefty tuitions (not to mention which the job markets desperately need to continue to function).
Now that the “Madagascar Trick” is out in the open, other methods of finding cheaters are still practiced, including identifying file creation and modification timelines. A file which took twenty minutes to prepare is suspect when a paper should take several hours of research and entry. Other programs can indicate how many keystrokes a student logged, providing physical proof of work done.
That we must account for every dishonesty in our academic world is a sad fact of life. Nobody wants to spend the time pursuing the goal in a social atmosphere which promises instant gratification. Nobody waits for anything anymore. People trample each other with events offering open stadium seating and no assigned seats. People who have no handicapped placard or signs of pregnancy or offspring with them pull their vehicles into designated parking with impunity. It starts with cutting in line in elementary school and ends in the self-checkout with items smuggled out of the store unpaid for.
Even the subject of daylight standard time contains an element of cheating (see my post from earlier this month). An entire hour out of the 24-hour clock which defines our days on Earth would simply disappear if saving time were made permanent, meaning we cheat ourselves out of how a true day and season should function. We can’t change basics of life to suit ourselves. This includes how time works and how academia is experienced.
But then I could go into a tangent about how youngsters now “graduate” from preschool, Kindergarten, elementary and middle school. The completion of twelve years of education is one goal met, and college graduation is a bonus to be cherished and honorably earned. The process has been in place for ages, and within a few years it has become a lesser achievement because the students have gone through two or three faux milestones already. Why should they care about how they get to the next step if it isn’t as important?
My biggest college final exam earned me a B, but I feel proud of it because I originated it, researched it, created it and worried over it. The best part of that experience was going to a museum to do the research for the paper and seeing ancient artwork and manuscripts. That opportunity never came around again, so I’m grateful for the challenge and the growth it brought to my life.
I didn’t even need to go to Madagascar.
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