When I was in college, there was a cheating scandal for the final exam where somehow people got their hands on the hardest question of the exam.

The professor noticed it (presumably via seeing poor "show your work") and gave zero points on the question to everyone. And once you went to complain about your grade, she would ask you to explain the answer there in her office and work through the problem live.

I thought it was a clever and graceful way to deal with it.

I agree. Most campuses use a product called Turnitin, which was originally designed to check for plagiarism. Now they claim it can detect AI-generated content with about 80% accuracy, but I don’t think anyone here believes that.

There have always been problems like this. I had a classmate who wrote poems and short stories since age 6. No teacher believed she wrote those herself. She became a poet, translator and writer and admitted herself later in life that she wouldn't have believed it herself.

Seems like this could be practically addressed by teachers adopting the TSA's randomized screening. That is, roll some dice to figure out which student on a given assignment comes in either for the oral discussion or-- perhaps in higher grades-- to write the essay in realtime.

It should be way easier than TSA's goal because you don't need to stop cheaters. You instead just need to ensure that you seed skills into a minimal number of achievers so that the rest of the kids see what the real target of education looks like. Kids try their best not to learn, but when the need kicks in they learn way better spontaneously from their peers than any other method.

Of course, this all assumes an effective pre-K reading program in the first place.

Write it in something like Google docs that tracks changes and then share the link with the revision history.

If this is insufficient, then there are tools specifically for education contexts that track student writing process.

Detecting the whole essay being copied and pasted from an outside source is trivial. Detecting artificial typing patterns is a little more tricky, but also feasible. These methods dramatically increase the effort required to get away with having AI do the work for you, which diminishes the benefit of the shortcut and influences more students to do the work themselves. It also protects the honest students from false positives.

Now imagine this but its a courtroom and you're facing 25 years

Doesn't google docs have fairly robust edit history? If I was a student these days I'd either record my screen of me doing my homework, or at least work in google docs and share the edit history.

How is that a dilemma for the students? What are their supposed options?

Guess you have to videotape or screen-record yourself writing it. Oh what a world we've created :-S.

I would screencast the whole thing and then tell my professor that we can watch a bit together.

Easy if one of these options might be available to the writer:

- Write it in google docs, and share the edit history in the google docs, it is date and time stamped.

- Make a video of writing it in the google docs tab.

If this is available, and sufficient, I would pursue a written apology to remind the future detectors.

Edit: clarity

edit history in Google docs is a good way to defend yourself from AI tool use accusations

I seriously think the people selling AI detection tools to teachers should be sued into the ground by a coalition of state attorneys general, and that the tools should be banned in schools.