Is It Time for End-of-College ‘Board’ Exams?

A recent Wall Street Journal headline proclaimed, “There’s a Good Chance Your Kid Uses AI to Cheat.” That article focused on the growing use of artificial intelligence to skirt the onerous tasks of writing, reading, critical thinking and analysis among middle and high schoolers. But epidemic levels of cheating among college students with generative AI are now an open secret among faculty. In our and our colleagues’ experience teaching at both an Ivy League university and a mid-tier regional public university, a sizeable proportion of student papers, reflections, homework assignments and exams are written wholesale by generative AI and then tweaked through more AI like StealthGPT, which unabashedly markets itself as being able to avoid detection as it “humanizes” language. Or the assignments are expertly rewritten, sometimes from drafts evidencing functional illiteracy, by AI tools such as Grammarly.