Even after July 1, however, professors will not interfere directly with attempts to cheat. Instead, they will observe and take notes, serving as “an additional witness in the room” who can testify in cases later brought before the Honor Court.
AI has quickly upended education, pushing many teachers to back off on written assignments and take-home tests in favor of in-class or even oral exams. As Princeton’s example shows, though, not even this is enough; plenty of students, given the chance, will just as happily use AI to cheat while in a classroom surrounded by their peers if they can get away with it.
Such widespread outsourcing of thought and memory is deeply depressing to many educators. This includes our own Scott Johnson, who recently penned a piece for Ars about what it feels like to grade so many responses generated by machines rather than by humans. (Hint: It does not feel good.)
It’s not like students think they are actually learning when they do this; they’re too smart for that, especially at Princeton. But when the pressure to succeed remains high, and the cost/difficulty of AI tools remains low, many students are tempted to take a shortcut, even one that ultimately harms them. As Scott concluded:
I haven’t encountered any students who think they’re learning when they let LLMs do their work, despite the face that college administrators and LLM advertising try to put on this. It’s just workload management to them.
Who knows what will happen if the AI bubble pops and the frictionless and ubiquitous access to LLMs withers into something much more limited. But while AI is here, it certainly isn’t revolutionizing education and enhancing learning. It’s just making it extraordinarily difficult to do all the things that have been helping students learn for a very long time.
That’s not how the AI companies see things, of course. When I read this week’s Daily Princetonian article on the proctoring change, I couldn’t help but notice the giant banner across the top of the piece. “PRACTICED TO PREPARED,” it said. It was an ad for Google Gemini.