ChatGPT Magnifies a Long-Standing Problem

Inside Higher Ed

Frank Vahid

April 6, 2023

A wise homeowner knows to deal with roof leaks right away. Otherwise, the leak will get worse, and one day a big rain will flood the house.

For colleges and universities, ChatGPT is that big rain.

And the leak is this: for some 20 years now, we really haven’t known who is doing homework, and most of us haven’t sufficiently revamped our classes to deal with that.

The rise of the internet in the 1990s and 2000s led to dozens of online homework solution sites that appear at the top of web search results and have become legitimized in students’ eyes. Google’s phone app has “Solve homework” as the third search option just after “Shop” and “Translate,” and university bookstores upsell students on those sites with offers like, “Get homework done fast!”

The internet also gave students easy, anonymous access to low-cost contractors who will write essays, code computer programs or take entire online courses. It made solutions from friends or family just an email away. And it gave students anonymous classmate access on apps like Discord or GroupMe, where solution trading occurs at a pace akin to the New York Stock Exchange trading floor.

Many professors may not be aware of how much cheating is actually happening in their classes. In an analysis I’ve done at professors’ requests, we found one large California university’s introductory computer science class had a 60 percent rate of blatant copying on at-home programming assignments. At another college, we found that every student in a 30-student computer science class was clearly copying their programs—every single one. It’s not just one subject and not just homework: a student in a biology class told me that nobody was learning because the professor reuses their quizzes and the solutions are all online. High cheating rates today are common across all disciplines.

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