Cheating is now so rampant that uni degrees have become worthless

As a university academic, I get a lot of weird emails.

The weirdest ones used to be those written by foreign students struggling with English (“Sorry I was late. My poodle dog aroused me several times during the night”), but the most bizarre ones now are those written in a variety of English I can only call humanoid.

AI has made university assessments a huge challenge. Credit: Getty Images

It’s pretty easy to spot the ones generated by ChatGPT. When a student who can barely speak a word of English tells me “your advice is invaluable for focusing my efforts effectively”, it’s not hard to understand they didn’t come up with that on their own. No human actually would.

Nor would any normal student tell me they are “open to any recommendations you may have and am willing to adjust my focus based on your advice”. I am glad that my “guidance and expertise are invaluable” and that students “look forward to receiving [my] response”.

Sometimes I amuse myself with the idea of answering a chatbot email with a similarly over-the-top response, contributing to the vacuity of these pointless exchanges generated by robots standing in for humans. Here’s what ChatGPT suggested for me to wish a student good luck with their work: “I wanted to take a moment to wish you all the best with your research endeavours. Your dedication and hard work are truly admirable, and I have every confidence that you will make significant strides in your field. Remember to stay focused, stay curious, and embrace every challenge as an opportunity for growth. Your passion for discovery is inspiring, and I can’t wait to see the exciting contributions you’ll make through your research. Wishing you success and fulfillment in all your academic pursuits.”

Let’s be grateful that actual humans don’t talk like this.

Rather disappointingly, my first written assessment of 2024 identified that at least 52 per cent of students had used AI to complete some or all of their papers. That’s probably an underestimation by the university plagiarism detector and is, in any case, a huge increase from the second semester of 2023.

By the end of the second semester, even the AI detectors had given up, and only the laziest students were getting caught. The “smarter” ones were obviously using AI, but editing it enough to be unprovable.

It isn’t just a matter of using AI to generate ideas, as the optimists would have you believe, or levelling the playing field between domestic and foreign students (as some idealistic academics would have it) by cleaning up grammar – it’s a matter of students telling AI to write a paper on the very subject they can’t be bothered to. Or, at the very least, an introduction. Or a conclusion. Or the methodology section. But more often than not, the whole damn thing.

Of course, much of this makes for nonsensical reading because, believe it or not, AI is no smarter than a smart human. But the essays have been nonsensical for years, since we started filling our classes with an overwhelming majority of full-fee-paying overseas students (as high as 85 per cent in some of my classes). Nothing wrong with that of course, except that many can’t speak, write or understand basic English.

Instead, these students use translators or text capture to translate the lectures and tutorials (if they care), translation aids to read the literature and write papers (if they bother), and now ,ChatGPT or its ilk to generate ideas. It’s mind-blowing to me that you can walk away with a master’s degree without being able to read or write a basic sentence in the language of the institution.

But it’s not just the overseas students taking advantage of the new technology. Many of the schoolteachers studying in my courses – the very people you’d suppose would be most opposed to this form of cheating – are handing in work partly or fully written by AI. They freely admit to writing your kids’ school reports and school newsletters this way, even while telling off students for doing the same thing.

They know that it’s almost impossible to fail university students these days (believe me, I’ve tried). Because while the use of AI is most often obvious even without the detection technology (too new to be fool-proof), cash is still king. And once you’re selling degrees, you’ve lost any kind of quality control.

The university as we know it is dead. COVID-19 nearly killed it, taking everything online and out of control, and AI has dealt it its death blow. Until we alter the way we assess students, a degree in many faculties is a waste of money in terms of everything but earning (rather than learning) potential.

Obviously, we have to change what we’re doing at schools and universities. This includes properly incorporating AI into the assessment procedure (as Sydney University says it will do), or returning to oral exams (as the University of South Australia has for some science programs). Otherwise, in too many cases, that expensive piece of paper will show nothing more than a student’s purchasing power, or that of their parent.

Detection technology will keep improving, of course. But so will AI. Until we can be assured that students are given opportunities to fail and that their degrees prove they know something about the subjects they are supposedly specialists in, they’re as meaningless as the essays students are submitting to swindle their way through their courses.

Dr Mindy MacLeod is a former lecturer who now tutors at the University of Melbourne.