I’m yet another of the professors—like Jonathan Zimmerman or Dan Drezner— who would say to students, “I don’t think you should use GPT, but I’m not going to remake myself into Inspector Javert and hound you to the end of the earth if you try.” That’s more or less the same position I take on plagiarism, which is that the main person being hurt by it is the student who does it. It’s a waste of an opportunity to learn, it’s sometimes more work than just writing from scratch, and the student who invariably turns to some form of cheating or cutting corners is either developing an unhealthy attachment to “beating the system” that’s going to end badly or is a compulsive bullshit artist, which I also tell them ends badly.
The professor is not bound to answer to the particular endings of their students. While it is pertinent to my direct teaching, I will give advice about what work I think is worth doing, the skills you need to do it, and why I think that skilled work is a good outcome of education. That includes writing and other work that at the time sparks no particular interest or enthusiasm in the writer, in the same sense that practicing music or any other skill can be a tedious affair but a necessary increment in becoming a performer. But that’s the key: I will give advice; I will not serve as commandant on the prison walls. College students are adults, despite the increasing tendency in higher education to think otherwise; these are among the first choices they make as adults.
Though I can’t quite sit pat on that proclamation, for two reasons. The first is that sometimes what college asks of a student is being asked at the wrong time in that student’s life, which is not their fault nor our fault. The social world of college is pretty well the right time for a transition between childhood and independent adulthood for many people, but the educational project might not be. I don’t advise a student who is in some hazy sense aware that they just cannot do this right now to GPT the shit out of it, but I don’t have much else to offer alternatively other than “do your best to soak up what you can while you can, dog-paddle enough to stay afloat, and some day a lot of it will make sense and you’ll be able to call on it all.”
I’m confident that this can be true—that it is not just me trying to reassure someone who is totally screwed—because I’ve seen it happen, because I’ve heard the testimony of former students about when all of it kicked in and their minds synchronized with the work of learning new things, and because that testimony is echoed in the memoirs and stories of many prominent public figures who muddled their way through college because it just wasn’t happening for them but who came into their own later and found ways to resurrect all the learning they witnessed but couldn’t respond to then.
However, this does raise the other reason that professors can’t just heedlessly say, “You’re adults, it’s your choice, I’m just gonna teach here and either you do the work or you don’t”, and never think on this issue again.
It’s true that some people don’t do the work (or don’t do it well), stumble out of the whole thing with a degree and a just-passing transcript, and later on find ways to reintegrate what they were exposed to, reacquire what they missed, and forge ahead with confidence and skill.
It’s also true that some people get so badly damaged by being in the wrong place at the wrong time that they’ll never feel whole again, where there’s an unacceptable cruelty to just being a bystander at that scene, and you have to do something to intervene.
And sometimes you have to say, “If enough people pass through here and feel like it’s the wrong time to learn what I’m teaching, or that it isn’t working for them, and they do wonderfully well in life as soon as they’re done, then I’m the one making the wrong adult choices.”
There’s a big side pot on the table on the proposition that bullshit artists eventually regret it, the compulsive “I’ll beat the system” approach eventually exacts a terrible price, and that most of the time people who approach college as an obstacle rather than an opportunity will regret it and wish they’d learned what they could have learned.
That the heavy use of GPT, or old-style plagiarism, or just plain Animal House-style fucking around will be something that gets found out, that it’s true that it’s no way to go through life.
As I read around on social media, I see a certain amount of overwrought conversation about GPT that I think is just plain fake coming from alleged students saying that they allegedly got unfairly punished for using GPT (sometimes unfairly because they didn’t, sometimes unfairly because they did but they were told it was ok). My suspicion is that a lot of these fake messages are just generalized disinformation being done as a sort of practice for troll farms and bots. I think some of them are coming from companies with a financial interest in AI who are trying to normalize the use of LLMs by students and this is one of the ways they’re trying to shift some common reference frames. (Sort of the “everybody’s doing it, why aren’t you doing?” schtick.)
But some of those messages are real by students who have been punished for alleged GPT use, and so are some of the messages by professors who are in fact freaking out.
All through the pandemic, one of the major public conversations among professors on social media was about cheating. Many faculty teaching huge intake classes and “weed-out” classes in large universities were freaking out about what they perceived to be an epidemic of students cheating, along with a wider range of students who just weren’t learning well because Zoom University wasn’t doing the job for many of them. It’s that freak-out, which was quite real, that fueled the sudden rise in really creepy forms of surveillance directed at students during testing and even just in regular class sessions.
I think that same structure of feeling is what is driving some professors into an intense obsession with GPT and its peers. If you look under the hood, one part of it is an authentic and caring professional concern with learning, with wanting to see students succeed. Inside that concern for some faculty is an intricate apparatus of assumptions, experiences, models and practices that assumes that stringent grading, high-stakes testing, and some form of ‘rigor’ is essential for most learning, that there have to be consequences for cheating right in the moment rather than just waiting for the other shoe to drop later on, when the accumulation of things that should have been learned and weren’t makes it impossible to continue.
I suspect, however, that one other driver of the concern about cheating—now invested in GPT—is a fear that in some specialized degree programs, with some credentials, students can cheat and never feel the consequences later on.
That’s already proven in the sense that there are periodic examples all over the world of high-ranking politicians and bureaucrats who get exposed as having committed plagiarism or having purchased a diploma mill fake degree years or decades after they’ve been functioning effectively in their careers. You have to suspect that if that’s true for them, it’s true in workplaces that aren’t subject to that sort of public scrutiny.
I’m not going to the provocative extreme of naming which credentials and courses that I suspect you could cheat your way through and never feel you missed anything, but I feel as if we all have a private list like that in our heads. And perhaps occasionally we fear that we’re on the list—or know that (unfairly) we are on a maliciously composed list that is fueled by political considerations.
So we watch that side pot grow where the bet on the table is “If you cheat, if you bullshit, if you waste your time too much, you’ll eventually get caught and you’ll eventually regret not having done the work” with considerable fear of the bet being called in and resolved once and for all against us. We see prominent bullshit artists flourish not because of the clever deployment of their bluffs and lies but instead their flagrant aggression, their serial-killer “I dare you to catch me” declarations. We see cheaters win. We see mediocrity rewarded, liars flourish, and hard-working excellence become a sort of private, interior satisfaction (or scourge) rather the guarantee of success. So for some faculty, going after GPT feels like a proxy for going after all of that, heading the desperadoes off at the pass. It feels like a way to shift the side pot odds in your favor.
I also want to win the side pot. I have plenty of stakes down on that table. But I not only think you can’t win against GPT, but that it’s the wrong fight to pick even if it stands in for the right thing to fight about. I want bullshit punished when it’s uttered, I want work where the skills we say are needed are actually needed and where there are inescapable consequences for not having them. I want it to be true when I tell students that it’s worth doing the work the right way and I want my sympathy for the student who isn’t ready to do that work not be a misplaced concern for the cynical and corrupt student who already knows that there’s a place waiting for them at the firm whether they do the work or not.
The only way I get what I want is by seeking a world where virtue and reality are more aligned than they are at present. I won’t get it by doffing a policeman’s hat and imagining that (academic) criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot. I can force a test of what I teach that produces failures within the structures I control, but that doesn’t protect my stake in the side pot. It actually just pushes what I do control further away from the reality of the world beyond my small, trembling grasp. It leaves me like Professor Dave Jennings, forlornly saying “I’m not joking! This is my job!” to students who have no choice but to see me as a ridiculous martinet trying to make all the world virtuous with regulations, commandments, and punishments, 15 young people at a time.
This is such a good article. I see this as being part of the broader crisis of confidence in the humanities. People need to think that what they are teaching matters intrinsically and will benefit people--that it's not just a mindless hoop for kids to jump through. And I thibj a lot of professors are afraid that what they're teaching isn't really worthwhile, so they're afraid to let go of the stick. But if discipline in college requires the stick, maybe there is something that is really wrong
Wow, everyone should be looking at this discussion, not only about the gbt “crisis” but more so about what is involved in learning within this span of life. Showing how much more there is to see and try to understand and to participate in beyond the yea and nay. Thanks Tim.