AI Cheating and Controversies in Education - DTNS Weekend
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Don't miss the Thomas Rhett Veteran Boots Tour this summer, fueled by Marathon. Now participate in locations. Terms and conditions apply. Hello, and welcome back to the Daily Tech News Show Weekend Edition. I'm Tom Merritt, and as promised, joining me again is Kevin Metcalf, Associate Vice Chancellor in IT at Foothill DeAnza. Kevin, welcome back. Hey, thanks for having me again. Appreciate it. Thanks for being willing to do all the positive good stuff in one episode.

And then addressing all of the controversies in another. I appreciate it. Yeah, no worries. So if you missed the first episode, Kevin, let's just do a real quick who you are for somebody who might be new.

Sure. So I'm an associate vice chancellor at the Foothill-De Anza Community College District. I've been in education for a little over two decades now and have a little over a decade of experience in the classroom as well. All right. So we moved all of the questions about cheating and controversies in education to this episode so we could give them our full attention. We've got a couple of questions to kick us off here. Zero asked,

How has AI impacted cheating? How do you plan on combating cheating with AI? And then Zio wanted to know if there's pushback from faculty members and how you deal with that.

Yeah, no, those are great questions. I mean, on the teaching front, the elephant in the room is cheating, right? If I ask a student to write a five-page paper on Moby Dick, can they just ask the AI to give it to them, right? And this is sort of the modern spin on asking your buddy who passed the class last year to write the paper for you or paying somebody online to do it.

Or in my day, going to the world book and just copying the entry, right? Yeah, exactly. It's always weird. You know, after being in higher ed as long as I have, I'm still always surprised when I find out someone is willing to pay for an education but not get the education they paid for. Yeah.

So it's always been possible to cheat, but yeah, the LLMs make it quite a bit easier, really lowers that barrier to entry. And so faculty are having to get creative with assignments. Maybe that looks like designing an assignment around applying course material to an experience that the student has lived through.

Or meet with the students one-on-one and have them read through their work and explain their reasoning for that. Or if you want to teach them how to use the tools, give them a prompt. Tell them, hey, push this one through in AI and then critique what it gives you. What did it get right? What did it get wrong? What did it miss? And a shift that may need to happen is just really communicating to the students

why it's important to actually understand the material. You know, if a student really gets why it's important, they're both less likely to cheat and they're more motivated to learn. Um, you know, and I think part of what's going on here, the issue is that education has really shifted, uh,

over the last several years. It used to be that colleges and universities were in the information business. If you want to learn something, that's where you have to go. They would hire people with the most knowledge and hope that they were capable of imparting that knowledge to others in a way that they could understand.

And that's really changed. I mean, if I want to learn something, I don't take a class on it. I go to YouTube. Right. And so colleges and universities are basically in the certification business now. You know, we put our reputation on the line every time we say Jenny knows all this stuff about computer science because she got a degree. Right. And so employers use the degrees we award.

when they're evaluating whether somebody really knows their stuff. It's kind of a shortcut. If HR gets 300 resumes for a position, they don't always have enough time to just go through all of them in detail, trying to make sure, does somebody have the knowledge they need? Do they have the skills? And when I'm hiring folks for my team, it depends on the job, whether I'm looking at a degree or not.

If this is for a college president or a dean, they probably need to have a graduate degree just to show that they understand what it's like to be a student in higher education. But if I'm hiring a technician that's going to be sitting down with a faculty trying to walk them through a hardware or a software issue,

I'm less likely to care if they have a bachelor's degree, as long as I can see somewhere on the resume that they've done something similar before. Right. So you're, you're trying to be the place that can vet that they got the right YouTube video and understood it basically. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean you can certainly go to YouTube to learn the information But then how do you convince an employer of that and so yeah the degrees are the shortcut that HR tends to to rely on and you know for me I don't even get all the resumes They're all pre-screened by human resources to vet them for certain minimum qualifications before they even get to me to then evaluate Yeah, and I mean on the IT front, you know if staff and faculty are using

AI and, you know, I don't know about that in IT, that can have some ramifications that end users probably haven't considered. You know, depending on what kind of school you are, AI generated meeting transcripts could be subject to a public records request. They could become discoverable in potential legal action. And I'm not suggesting that people are doing things they need to hide or anything like that. Sure.

Just that for IT, it means that as part of our work, we have to be able to find those documents. We have to be able to track them down. And that's something that currently happens pretty easily with email, right? Email tends to be centralized. And so it's easy for me to just tell my system administrator, "Hey, these are the keywords you got to search for. Find it, export it, turn it over." But if some staff member just adds a random AI bot to a Zoom meeting,

How does IT know about that? How do I know to go look for that? You know, we don't want to be in a situation where there is something that should be public record, but we don't know we have it to turn it over when it's asked for. Yeah, it took a while for people to realize that about email.

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That it wasn't just temporary stuff that you sent and no one saw, you know, and now email's been around a lot that people kind of are accustomed to that. So it's getting accustomed to what those things are with these tools, I think.

Yeah, and we still see those episodes in DTNS where somebody finds something in email. It's like, oops, that was something that should not have been in email. Yeah, right, right. And so that sort of leads us to this idea of all of the issues that the administration has to deal with. Like many governmental entities, education doesn't always move very fast, right?

You know, if you put a bunch of people in a room that are generally paid to think about things, they tend to overanalyze things. So developing AI policies can take a while, you know, because because people want to get it right. And, you know, they'll they'll argue over the minutia there. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. A lot of times people jump to the conclusion that the folks making the policies just don't know what they're doing or they don't get it. And when a lot of times they're just they're just being careful.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and it has, you know, has impacts on our accreditation cycle as well. And that's one of those education terms. So in order to prove that a school is actually doing what they claim to be doing, and in higher ed, so that our students can get financial aid, schools go through an accreditation cycle. And that process involves producing a report stating what you're doing, and just a massive amount of evidence to back all of that up.

and I'm oversimplifying this, but the details are boring, so we'll gloss over that. So folks from the accrediting body will spend a lot of time looking into everything the school does in order to make sure it's legit. Well, a specialized LLM could help compare the report to the evidence and suggest areas where the accrediting body should really concentrate their scrutiny, right? So that they're not having to spend

all of their time looking at absolutely everything. You know, you're not taking the experts out of the process, but, you know, people get fatigued looking at mountains of paperwork. And so, you know, that second set of eyes that we talked about, you know, that doesn't

They don't get tired, right? The model doesn't. And that can be incredibly helpful. And even the courts are still trying to figure this out. I mean, if you just do a Google search using some variation on school, AI and lawsuit, you're going to get a whole gamut of things. Parents are suing because their child was accused of using AI or I think a while back there was the story about the student that was suing the school because they thought the faculty had just used AI to teach the class, right?

Yeah, yeah. It is a lot of things that are being worked out at the moment and a lot of processes that are happening. We've got another question from JJ who says, based on your findings and what you've seen around the campus, are students using AI more than the faculty or more than the administrators? Or is it the other way around? How would you rank those three groups as far as their AI usage goes? Yeah, I will say it's a...

It's a recent enough development that I don't have a lot of hard evidence. But, you know, from talking with my colleagues, I would say that students probably use the tools the most. And I think the students would tell you, yes, we use it the most. You know, and different students use them in different ways, right? Sure. Obviously, some cheat, but some use the tools as tutors to help them learn. You know, and I would suggest that it may also be tied to where the students are coming from. You know, are they really motivated to learn or are they just going through the motions because they have to?

You know, some students coming to our colleges, you know, they're coming from these really high achieving schools in the Bay Area, and they're very motivated to actually learn. But, you know, ultimately, it's going to be up to every teacher to really help students understand the positive and the negative ways to use those tools.

Between faculty and administrators, it's a little harder for me to answer, but I do know that my colleagues in IT management around the state use these tools pretty regularly. You know, most educational institutions are just underfunded, right? And there's no end to how much work there is to do. You know,

If I can leverage a tool to help me get my work done in 60 hours a week instead of 80 hours a week, that's a big win, right? - Yeah, I think that gets lost a lot of times when people talk about like, oh, these tools are gonna reduce the need for workers. A lot of times workers are being overworked and there are not great ways to make sure that someone is working the required number of hours or the expected number of hours. So being able to get that closer to what that is could be helpful.

Couple other questions here. These are along the same lines, so I'll give them to you both at the same time. Nick from Australia asks, where do you see opportunities for LLMs and similar AI to enhance the educational experience for students? Could they be leveraged to customize curricula, which we talked a little bit on the last episode, to maximize learning for each individual student perhaps?

And then Jeff in Chicago asks, are there any indicators of AI entrenching a have and have not dynamic that might penalize those that can't afford to use it?

Oh man, these are great questions. This is the kind of thing that gets me out of bed in the morning, right? Figuring out how do we work on this? There are so many opportunities for efficiency gains on operations, administrative tasks, things like that. In terms of just enhancing the education experience, I mean, education is a mystery, right? A student going from, I should go to college to I have a degree.

That student is not walking an obvious path, right? You have to apply to be admitted. You have to figure out what you want your major to be, register for all the right classes.

If you don't know the language, that's a huge hurdle, right? Sure. What if your guidance counselor could work with you and your personal AI assistant to come up with the optimal schedule? I mean, maybe you're planning to go to school full time and the regular course schedule works for you, but what if you're a single parent and you're working a couple of jobs and you can only take online classes or classes at a certain time? Well, an LLM that's been trained on the course catalog and historic scheduling data

That could be the difference between getting your degree in four years or getting your degree in eight years. As for the haves and have not question, I think AI can actually also help level the playing field. If your parents and your siblings went to college, then they can probably answer your questions if you get lost in the process. But for a first-generation student,

Where do you go? It's AI that's been trained on the various student services that are available at a school can help them figure out what to do next or where to go for help. That can be the difference between getting a degree and dropping out of school. Imagine if your phone periodically had a pop-up from the AI agent asking, "What are you struggling with this week?"

And so you talk to it and it just automatically creates an appointment with the appropriate staff to provide that help that you need. Would you say that most students that you encounter have a smartphone these days? I would say the vast majority of our students do have a smartphone. I would say a lot of our students...

I don't know if I would say the majority, but definitely a big percentage of them are phone first, if not phone only. Yeah. You know, they just don't even have laptops or anything like that. So, you know, finding ways to ensure that, you know, we're not using just the tools that are convenient for us, but are, you know, meeting the students with the tools that are convenient for them. You know, that, that,

That's a really huge benefit to them, right? I'm just imagining that most students can hop on community college Wi-Fi with their phone and then use some chatbots that are available for free and be able to access stuff. Yeah. And our schools are even looking at specifically having, you know, AI based chatbots that have been trained on the material from the website and some of this stuff. So it's not, you know, a total hypothetical. You know, we're in the process of starting to see these develop in real time. That's great.

And another way that these tools can help with this kind of stuff is in the area of predictive analytics. So if all of our instructors are using the learning management system, if you've taken a class in the last five years, you definitely know what this is. It's a tool like Canvas or Blackboard or Moodle, basically an online shell where the instructors can put their assignments and can store their grades. Well, if all the instructors have their assignments and grades there,

And LLM can process all that data in real time and advise the counseling department, "Hey, you know, this student is falling behind in multiple classes.

You know, for me as a single faculty member in one class, that's something that happens. And I don't know, it's not just my class, right? You know, and there's a chance there to reach out to the student and see what's going on, you know, provide additional resources if needed, or at least have the, you know, the counselors talk to the faculty and say, hey, you know what? This student's going to need more time on their assignments. They got to get caught up in four classes, you know? Otherwise, you know, again, they get overwhelmed, they drop out. And that's something that just no one wants to see, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely not.

And that would be worth it. And it's all data that the school already has access to. It's just putting it in front of the right people. Yeah. And it's making sure, again, with that data governance piece that the school owns the data and not the vendor that's running the tools on the back end. All right. Last question comes from PJ Les. How do you view education's role in educating students and even faculty in ethical use of AI, not just in education, but business as well?

Yeah, this is one of those ones where I want to be very clear that I am wearing my personal experience hat and not my, I am a manager at this organization hat. Sure, sure. I think you've hit on the core struggle here that education is facing right now with respect to AI in general. Our goal as educators is to teach students to be informed and empowered digital citizens.

not just people that have been trained to use a tool. You know, I think about how much the world of technology has changed since I graduated in the nineties, right? There's no reason to think that the next 40 years won't see that same pace of change, if not even something bigger, right? I can't even imagine what that would look like. So it's about teaching ethics and not tools, you know, and a major struggle that I'm seeing is that it's not just computer science, right? A lot of people think, well, AI, that's the computer science world. Well,

nearly every area of study needs to update their curriculum around these questions. Imagine if you are taking an accounting class or a journalism class and they thought this was a computer science issue and didn't bother to talk about AI in their curriculum.

right? That could be a problem because it just impacts everything. So we need to make sure that we are appropriately embedding these critical thinking skills in every area of study, right? And if students are going to graduate without those skills, they're going to have a hard time finding a job later on, right? And that's part of what we're here to do is to certify, you know, again, that they know how to do these things that are necessary. So

You know, to really prepare our students for their career, schools have to figure out how to provide resources to the faculty that are building these courses. You know, we can't expect every faculty in every discipline to become an AI ethics expert overnight or even at all, right? So at our colleges, we actually have full-time staff who are experts in online pedagogy. And there's another one of those fancy words. It just means how to teach effectively.

But any faculty member who wants to teach online has to be trained by the staff in order to learn what works online and what doesn't work online. And we're going to need to have something similar for the use of these tools. So if you understand education and you're an expert in AI, hey, there's a consulting opportunity for you right now, right?

So, but I guess that sort of takes us back to those policy questions, right? You know, and I know it's boring, but it is important. You know, in any sufficiently large institution, your corporate policy dictates how the business should be run. And in most public schools, those key policies have been written by the state or federal legislature. So, you know, a colleague of mine jokes that, you know, for every dollar of public money we spend, we're required by law to spend about $5 tracking it and making sure it's being used effectively.

So all that to say, there's a lot of people working on this at a lot of different levels. And it seems like the goalposts move pretty much every day as the technology evolves. So I'm personally hoping somebody comes up with an LLM that's designed to quickly create policy that everybody agrees on.

That would be wonderful. If not a miracle. If everyone would trust it, but it would be a good step. Yeah, we're still in the hockey stick part of this, not the blade, the handle part of the hockey stick. But yeah, it's going to keep changing. And so I really like your point about we need to teach the ethics, not the tools. We need to teach how to approach situations, not the particular tech

tactical ways that the situations are done. Because I think that that has a more longevity and eventually we'll reach cruising altitude with this tool.

We'll wrap our heads around it, right? And then there'll be something else. Yeah, it's the same thing that we've had to do to wrap our heads around when the internet was first introduced to us, right? It was the same kind of learning. And so now everybody talks about how do you integrate digital literacy into your classroom, you know, things like that. So it's not that it's a brand new thing that's happening. It's just a new technology that we need to make sure we wrap our heads around in order to be able to, you know, have folks use it effectively. Yeah.

Well, Kevin, thank you for multiple things.

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in talking to us. Thanks for answering folks' questions. If you're like, wait, where'd these questions come from? Patrons in our Discord asked a lot of really, really good questions. So thanks to everybody who posed these questions in that Discord thread. I want to congratulate us for never bringing up calculators as an analogy through this entire thing.

I think that it's not a wrong metaphor, but it's kind of an old one. So I think we deserve a pat on the back for being able to talk around that as well. Any last messages or thoughts that you want to tell people before we wind up here? I mean, I would say...

Experiment with the tools. If you haven't done it before, if you're not sure how they can be used, you can even ask the tools, "Hey, how do I use you? What kinds of things are you useful for?" Just because you're not in school doesn't mean you shouldn't take the time to learn about this stuff. The more you know about how these things can be utilized in your career, whatever that happens to be, that's gold when it comes to looking for that next position that you want to get to.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for being willing to do two episodes about this with us. If folks want to find out more about you, what you do, where should they go? Oh, yeah. You're welcome to check out my LinkedIn profile. I'll head over there and make sure it's up to date. It's Metcalf with an E at the end, folks. Kevin Metcalf. And Kevin, thanks once again for all of your amazing support of the show and your ideas and your thoughts over the years. I really appreciate it, man. Sure. No E at the end.

Oh, there's no E at the end. Really? Oh, I'm going to update everywhere that I've typed your name. How did that sneak in there? I should have had an AI double check. There we go. You need that second pair of eyes. There is no E at the end of Metcalf. But there is an L, right? I'm right about that. There's an L in there. Okay. It's where you meet the baby cows, the Metcalf. Metcalf. See? Easy to remember. It's literally where it comes from. Thank you so much. I appreciate it, man. You're welcome. Anytime.

And thank you folks for supporting us at patreon.com slash DTNS. It's one of the reasons we do these bonus episodes on the weekends. We'll be back on Monday. Talk to you then. The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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