18 Cheating as Symptom, not Disease

As a literature professor, I’m overwhelmed at the prospect of deciphering whether an essay has been written by a machine. I hate engaging in the surveillance-state scrutiny of a particularly well-written sentence and having to wonder if that student improved because they’re learning or if they’ve thrown up their hands and turned to cheating. With a fraught relief, however, I remind myself that, though the technological tools are new, cheating itself is not. ChatGPT presents a new iteration of the deeply entrenched practice of having someone or something ghost-write a student’s essay. I remind myself of this, my anxiety barely allayed, as I throw away another glossy mailer with “Let us write your essay!” emblazoned across it. If you, too, find yourself dismayed at the task of sniffing out plagiarism, think with me, for a moment, about how academia has been structured to not only enable but encourage students to cheat.

A student who turns to ChatGPT for help writing an essay might do so for many reasons, some of which, I’m sure, are done in bad faith. In this vignette, however, I want to consider a specific subset of college students: those who don’t want to cheat but do. In an institution that expects perfection, in a culture in which a grade may mean the difference between returning to school or not, some students—especially those taught to equate their worth as a human with their performance in school—learn to treat grades like capital: something to accumulate at all costs, something that determines your worth and well-being within a hierarchical system. When that’s the case, I can’t help but look to grades as a punitive measure and the classroom as a place where it’s more important to replicate knowledge than to produce it. If we think of Chat GPT as a symptom of the imperative students feel to achieve perfection, we can start to think about what the root causes might be in academia. If cheating is the symptom, the disease, then, is white supremacy.

It may seem like a leap to say that the perfectionist drive in students is a factor of and contributor to white supremacy in higher learning. The idea, however, isn’t new. Fields such as Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, and Indigenous Studies since their founding in the 1960s and 1970s have articulated the ways in which academia as it currently exists in the United States is a machine of white supremacy. They have all been forced to fight for room in an institution that was entrenched into cultural consciousness before their identity groups were considered human. Because the US academy was founded to keep knowledge and power in the hands of white men, white supremacist ideology is entrenched in how we think about learning and how we teach. Without realizing it, mostly, our classrooms are spaces that privilege some learners over others and reinforce ableist ideology that endorses “right” and “wrong” ways to measure learning. One aspect of this phenomenon is called the “hidden curriculum” or the things that college teaches that we don’t realize we’re teaching, things so entrenched in our curriculum that we might not even see them anymore. Constructions such as late work policies, attendance policies, grades, GPAs, standardized testing, and most of the trappings of what it means to be a “good” student are tied up in this hidden curriculum.

One suggestion for intervening into academia’s white supremacist ableism, especially in the age of ChatGPT, is to interrogate your grading conventions, with the intention of abolishing them completely. A resource to help is Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) edited by Susan Blum, in which she argues that grading is actively harmful to student learning. By interrogating grades, you can open up space in your classes for alternative methods of assessment that embrace productive failure and didactic imperfection, two necessary countermeasures to a white supremacist insistence on perfectionism.

A few questions to start: Why grade at all? What do grades do in your class? How do you know a grade represents a student’s learning and what would your class look like without them? If you can, consider moving away from a grade for an assignment and find other ways to reward students for its completion. Maybe a student can’t move onto the next assignment until they have successfully addressed your feedback. Maybe students who complete an assignment imperfectly are encouraged to try again with a different set of instructions or in collaborative pairs so the misunderstandings of one student can be clarified by another. Reducing or abolishing late work penalties can also alleviate the pressure to perform under tight deadlines – another punitive measure that might move a student to cheat rather than to try. By thinking about students using ChatGPT to cheat as symptomatic of white supremacist ideology in the US academy, we as instructors can work backward to create classrooms where AI can exist as a tool to improve learning rather than to stymy it. As instructors, let’s try to encourage the messy and the incomplete and leave the “perfect” to the machines.

References

Blum. S. (Ed.). (2020). Ungrading: Why rating students undermines learning (and what to do instead). West Virginia University Press.

About the author

name: Adena Rivera-Dundas

institution: Utah State University

Dr. Adena Rivera-Dundas is an Assistant Professor of English at Utah State University. Her research examines how Black American scholars, poets, and novelists deploy personal archives to disrupt oppressive epistemologies. Working at the intersections of personal narrative, Black feminism, and affect studies, she examines the ways in which contemporary writers use embodied experience as evidence to create intimacy with readers while simultaneously resisting easy, unearned access to Black subjectivities. She is currently working on a book titled Intimate Scholarship: Embodying the Personal in Black Feminist Writings.