It is a weekday afternoon, and I and a supervisor are sitting down with a student who plagiarized a portion of his essay. The student hasn’t fessed up to his crime, so we are awaiting a fourth party, the school’s tech person, to conclude an investigation into the student’s document history. The atmosphere among myself, my supervisor, and the student is clinical, with an element of foreboding.
Amidst this silence, my supervisor pointedly asks the student, “Did you do this?”
“A little bit,” he finally admits.
“Tell me about a little bit,” she says, and he fleshes out the details of his essay’s origin, involving being late to begin the work, therefore stressed, generating portions of the essay using artificial intelligence, doctoring those portions to blend them with writing of his own.
In response to this divulgence, my supervisor shames the student, saying she is “very disappointed” in him and outlining the more ethical choices he could have made. For instance, rather than beginning the work both late and in a state of stress, he might have started earlier; more practically, he might have asked me, his teacher, for help or for an extension. In this meeting among the three of us, he might had admitted earlier to his crime.
To me, this whole moral superstructure feels a little hackneyed. The fact is that school in itself privileges performance, not intention, and hence the student was very much incentivized to cheat. Once caught, he was further incentivized to deny it, because so long as evidence did not come forth he would get away with a higher grade and thus be on his merry way to graduation.
The immediately above may sound cynical, but these incentives embedded within school merely stand as the microcosm of much more ubiquitous, thorny, and perverse incentives in our society at large. In a world in which a president can attempt to overthrow a just election, rack up felony charges, be found liable for sexual assault, and still return to office, how trite does it feel to tell students not to cheat?
What moral absolute can teachers possibly mantle in this zeitgeist?
It is of some interest that my supervisor’s entire approach to the student resembles Catholic confession, and she herself is Christian; indeed, so is the genesis of modern schooling, which collapses labor, discipline, and salvation into the promise of social mobility. From my perspective, the problem is that America’s cultural obsession with individuality has eaten away at this religious imperative, such that we no longer believe in the “good” and instead focus only on the goods; if you can behave immorally and still arrive at the same hereafter, then why not do so?
Given this evaporation of moral certitude, what do we say to the student who cheats? What intrinsic reward can we postulate?
What about telling the student that even supposing they evade punishment for academic integrity violations, or parallel offenses, they won’t be happy? In itself this pronouncement recalls religion, but it centers on the student rather than on a hypothetical God. What about prophesying for students that in the short term, they may get away with plagiarism, but in the long run their souls will be corroded? They will know that that award-winning essay wasn’t truly theirs; they will live and die a fraud.
The trouble with such naked speech is that unlike the shaming, morally absolutist framing of a prior era, the precepts above must be experientially tested; no longer does the teacher tell the student, “You mustn’t do this because it’s wrong;” instead, the teacher invites the student, “Try out the erroneous path if you want; it may work for you for a while, but in the end you will suffer.” Like the God of a new age conception, in this rendering the teacher becomes simultaneously detached, and benevolent; they hope for the student’s best, but will not intervene to force that outcome. More tangibly for the teacher’s purposes, they surrender investment in whether the student heeds their warning—especially in a world in which ChatGPT equips students with the rhetorical equivalent of nuclear bombs.
After my student admits to his plagiarism and leaves the room, the tech person returns, ferrying his document history. Indeed, basically the student’s entire essay was AI-generated; even that portion my AI-tracker did not flag, the student merely successfully obscured. From our moral exhortations, will this student “learn his lesson?” Since we subsequently decide to have him rewrite the essay, will his soul be unburdened for this task? More likely, will he simply learn to more effectively hide his transgressions, therefore not getting busted the next time?
In truth, neither my supervisor nor I can ever fully know; the matter rests between the student, his laptop, and God.
Jackson Holzberg Buckley 