The AI-enabled cheating at Brown University is old news by now, but I kept mulling over it, mostly from the perspective of a (slightly self-righteous and somewhat forgetful) Gen-X.
"AI was just a means of cheating! The real issue is that the kids didn't care to learn. They didn't see the value of what they were learning!" I ranted to my husband. (We have two kids in college, so this is a high-stakes conversation in our household.)
That perspective kept me going for a few weeks, until this morning, when I remembered the classes I took in college that were intentionally "gut classes." Psychopharmacology: All exams were straight out of the book; just memorize, no actual thinking needed. Electron Microscopy: a few weeks at Intersession with a really likeable lecturer who invited the class over to dinner.
Easy "A"s. I didn't cheat. But neither did I learn nor retain anything after the class. (The only thing I do recall is that looking at water through an electron microscope is really cool. Surface tension becomes real in a way we don't usually experience.)
The point is that when the Brown University professor announced the take-home exams, students enrolled in that Econs class, realizing that they could cheat their way to an easy "A".
Yes, we need to stop the AI-enabled cheating, but we also should ask why students gravitate toward classes for easy "A"s while fully realizing that they have no intention to master the content for the long-term.
Misaligned incentives? Misaligned priorities? Failure to communicate how critical content mastery really is?
Those are a lot harder to fix than implementing systems and processes to catch the cheating, and they are far more critical to address.
The cheating could just as easily have happened in a Nursing class, where content mastery really does matter. Calculate the dosage incorrectly, and people could die. Content mastery is not optional, and yet, often, the student's instinct is just to get through the class and check the box.
Fortunately, I have children to experiment on, and I'll let you know if I'm even remotely successful at emphasizing the necessity of true mastery vs landing the easy A.
But THAT is the real problem, not the fact that students used AI to cheat.
About Amelia Waters
Amelia Waters is the Managing Partner of EDSO Edge, a strategic growth and operations consulting firm serving PE-backed healthcare education and EdTech companies. Her background spans BCG, a decade at Kaplan, and COO roles at PE-backed companies. She writes Ideas from the Edge for executives and high-performers on systems thinking, leadership, and the operating principles she finds in everyday life.
Learn more at edso-edge.com.