Academic Integrity

Academic integrity may be a loaded term but what it really boils down to is cheating. As a scientist and researcher, I know the importance of doing your own work and giving credit where credit is due. I am not sure when I learned cheating is not okay or that there are stiff punishments but I do know it has been ingrained into me from a young age.

It leaves me to wonder, what is happening with the youth of today? Is it just my classroom where the cheating is rampant? Or is it prevalent in classrooms across the country?

Here are some incidents of cheating that I have either witnessed or overheard this semester:

• College professor pulling a student into the hallway who had used ChatGPT on their phone during the final exam of their course.

• Students in my class with their classmate’s project copying verbatim their work.

• Student using ChatGPT (or another artificial intelligence source) to write their entire college paper.

• Students using ChatGPT to write 200 word discussion posts.

• Students having their classmate complete their math homework for them.

• Students having the assignment or document of their classmate open on their computer and actively working on the assignment.

• Students creating a workaround for the sharing of assignments created in Google Classroom: create a copy and then share it with your classmate - your teacher can’t see (if you try to share a document in Google Classroom that is given to you by the teacher, the teacher automatically gets notified).

• Students “answering” questions on an online quiz game but then asking a classmate to check their answer each time (because they don’t want to fail and get a low grade, as the student explained to me for why their classmate had to check their response every time). This may not be outright cheating but isn’t that the same as someone doing your work for you?

• Students sharing photos of their worksheet with each other then copying the responses - even if the response is incorrect, they still blindly copy.

In just one semester, I have seen more copying and cheating than I could ever imagine. Whether or not you want to argue that some of my examples are not technically cheating, the point is that students these days - our future generation - are cutting corners and doing themselves a disservice in the long run. I find the vast majority of my students lack critical thinking skills. Today, one student was reviewing for their upcoming biology final exam and the question asked about the most critical invention that helped in the discovery of cells (or something to that effect). The student looked at me with a look of utter confusion. I looked at the four answer choices and chuckled (I couldn’t help myself). I asked the student, what is the most logical response here and they told me “telescope”? I was in disbelief. The student looked at me like they were so confused and I continued, “Look at the choices. What makes the most logical sense?” To my dismay, the student looked lost. I asked them to analyze the results again and finally they realized that there was only one choice that was even in the realm of possible answers: microscope. Yes, the choice was “compound microscope” but the other choices were not even close to a microscope. Telescope, maybe, but even then, that looks far into the distance and cells are not, to my knowledge, found in our solar system.

As I continued to listen to the conversations with my students, one could not figure out the correct response to a question about enzymes and substrates. The key word in the question was “inhibitor”, to which the student told me they didn’t know the word. I asked if they knew what “inhibit” meant and they said “to live in”? They confused inhabit and inhibit. Innocent mistake, maybe, but my bigger worry is that they said they could not define inhibit. I used this as an opportunity to discuss the importance of vocabulary words, of reading diverse texts, and of actually using the words they learn, not just memorize for a test.

I was met with a lot of resistance. This conversation happens on a daily basis, not only about vocabulary but about the amount of work they have, the question of why they cannot just use the Internet, or why they have all these assignments they have to do. The most common response I get when I ask students to take out an assignment to work on is “I need a break”.

I don’t quite know what is happening but what I do know is that our educational system is failing our students. I am not quite convinced that it is simply a result of the underdeveloped teenage brain or of immaturity.

What do I make of the work I am doing if all that results is a growing resentment towards me?