5 ways to discourage your students from cheating with AI

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, students have been increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) tools when doing schoolwork.

While AI can support students' learning processes, it can also be used to generate entire written essays, solve complex equations, and answer quiz questions with minimal human input.

There’s clearly a big difference between using AI to support school tasks, and using it to complete whole projects that masquerade as the student’s own ideas. So, how can teachers tell the difference - and how can you discourage students from cheating with AI?

Is using AI cheating? Well, it depends…

There’s no doubt that the use of AI is already widespread. In a survey from the US, 72% of K12 students said they have used AI for school, with 56% using it for help with writing assignments. In another study of university-age students, 89% of respondents said they have used ChatGPT to help with a homework assignment.

It’s important for teachers to clarify the difference between using AI as a learning tool and cheating with AI. In essence, a student is cheating when they use AI to gain an unfair advantage and submit AI-generated work as their own.

For example, a student might prompt ChatGPT to write a history essay from scratch that they were asked to research, plan, and write themselves. Or they might input a complex maths problem that they should be figuring out manually.

Unchecked cheating with AI is catastrophic not only for students but for teachers and institutions too. Students miss out on opportunities to learn and develop critical skills. For teachers, AI cheating limits your ability to properly assess your students’ capabilities.

Ways to discourage students from cheating with AI

So, how can you discourage AI cheating? Let’s find out.

1. Build an in-depth understanding of AI

The first step towards preventing AI cheating is to understand what is and isn’t possible with AI. Regardless of how you feel about the technology, it’s important to deepen your knowledge of how it works, how you can use it as a teacher, and how your students are leveraging it. You can do this by seeking out online resources and attending workshops on AI in education, and speaking to colleagues about their experiences.

With this understanding, you’ll be more equipped to identify AI cheating. You’ll also be able to better design assessments that AI can’t do for them and assignments that intentionally integrate AI (more tips on these later!).

Read our AI glossary for teachers to get started.

2. Set tasks that incorporate students’ experiences and contexts

Certain subjects lend themselves to personalisation in a way that makes AI cheating much more difficult. It’s trickier with maths or science, but in languages, humanities and social science, you can set assignments that require students to incorporate their own, unique contexts and experiences.

For example, in a language class, you could ask the students to create a social cartography of their community and present it orally in the target language. In a history class, you could ask students to interview an older person in their family about a significant historical moment they lived through, and compare it to media coverage of the event.

Learn more about AI writing tools and education.

3. Coach students to use AI as a mentor instead

Students are using AI more and more - and it’s not always for the purposes of cheating. In one study of teens and young adults, respondents said they mostly use AI for getting information (53%) and brainstorming (51%). So, rather than impose an outright ban on tools like ChatGPT, you could coach students on how to use AI as an educational mentor and virtual tutor.

How can you show students how to prompt ChatGPT or other language models to guide them through the discovery of what they need, versus just generating the answer? Let’s say you’re quizzing students on how electricity works. Instead of the students asking ChatGPT to provide the entire explanation, they could use the prompt:

“I’m curious about how electricity works, but I need to understand it step by step. Could you help guide me through the basic concepts by asking me questions and providing explanations based on my answers?”

By using this question-based approach, ChatGPT engages the student in a dialogue and helps them become active learners and more deeply understand the topic. This recent study showed that encouraging students to use ChatGPT in this way – as a tutor, and not a crutch – boosted students’ homework scores and mitigated the negative impact of overreliance on AI.

You might also turn to education-specific AI tools to help students learn. For example, Khan Academy’s Khanmigo is an intelligent tutor that guides students through exercises, helping them better understand and engage with topics. It can quiz them based on the content they’re studying and even adopt the tone and personality of literary and historical figures, and speak with students as if it was that person.

Find out how AI in education can help your school improve accessibility.

4. Incorporate AI into assessments

Another way you can prevent cheating and help students gain crucial skills in the modern world is by creating assessments that require them to use AI. Just like maths tests incorporated the calculator, and humanities projects allowed internet research, many subjects can now merge AI into assessments too.

One way you could do this to help students improve their writing skills is to give them an AI-generated essay that’s representative of one they’d have to submit for the class. Then, ask them to reverse-engineer the process of writing the text using AI. They’d prompt the AI to create an outline and share the sources used, breaking down the method of essay writing into individual steps.

You could also use AI to bolster students’ critical thinking skills. Again, you’d provide an AI-generated outline or text on a given topic. Then, ask students to reflect on questions that get them to think critically: Who’s perspective is missing from this text? Are there any sources you would add? Which identities are represented, and which are lacking? You would then grade their process of critical editing and comparison.

Discover which AI tools you can use in the classroom.

5. Use regular or timed assignments

Finally, you could integrate smaller and more regular assignments, and timed quizzes and tests into your teaching to prevent AI cheating. By setting smaller, frequent assessments throughout a course, rather than big, high-pressure projects or exams, students are less inclined to procrastinate and resort to cheating to get things done last minute.

You could also set in-classroom timed assignments, and monitor browser usage if students are using a computer or tablet. Even better if they’re handwritten – sometimes the old-school way is best!

Dive into the debate on AI and education.

How to protect your school’s academic integrity

AI in education is here to stay. Schools and teachers have to strike a balance between preventing cheating and integrating AI into the curriculum. By creating opportunities for students to support their learning with AI, you not only discourage them from using AI disingenuously but equip them with crucial skills for the technological world we all inhabit.