4-minute read
AI in the classroom: Cheating, learning and the new academic gray zone
AI tools are popular at work, but what about college? Students and schools grapple with ethical concerns.
- Educators are creating “AI-resistant” classrooms to combat student plagiarism and dependency on the technology.
- Some professors are banning laptops and cell phones, reintroducing in-class essays and oral exams.
- The rise of AI is part of a larger challenge for teachers: capturing the attention of a digitally native generation.
Human-in-the-loop. Dependency. Cognitive deskilling. Human extinction. Deep-fakes — and plagiarism. The lexicon of AI is everywhere now, as is the technology, but in few places is it as suspect as in the classroom.
Artificial intelligence is intended to help reduce human labor, but classrooms are for humans to learn through labor.
So where does that leave college faculty and school teachers?
After two years of fending off student work submitted through ChatGPT — AI generated homework, raising a hand to answer in-class questions after typing in prompts, and reading instant summaries instead of assigned texts are some examples — professors and teachers are finally the wiser for trying to beat back the AI dragon.
Story continues below photo gallery
For Amir Moosavi, assistant professor of comparative literature at Rutgers-Newark, and Carlo Rotella, who teaches English at Boston College, one answer is to throw out technology. The battle to beat out AI is only a part of the larger challenge — to command their students’ attention.
Nothing beats deep engagement with real live teachers who know how to foster and hold attention, they say. Moosavi and Rotella are counting on it.
Banning laptops and cell phones in class
Rooting out plagiarizing through AI means more oral exams, “exit interviews” with each student at the end of the semester where the professor questions them on their assignments, in-class pop quizzes, and proof of having studied for written essays, such as including quotes with citations and page numbers in the text, said Moosavi.
For freshmen and sophomores, essay assignments were already on their way out. And in 2026, Moosavi is taking another step to thwart AI use — he’ll ban cell phones in class.
And ironically, the blue books are back, as are pens, pencils and erasers in Rotella’s “AI-resistant” classroom, which he wrote about in the New York Times.
“I really emphasize specificity and concreteness in student writing and AI is not very good at that,” Rotella said. “It has to be re-prompted a lot in order to do that. It’s just a labor-saving device and in an English class, the labor is the entire point of the class.
“I think it’s different than other situations where AI can do things that people can’t do that need to be done, but that’s not the case here,” Rotella said. “It’s just simply doing some of the thinking, some of the writing, some of the reading for the student and the whole point of the class is for the student to do the work.”
Rotella has banned cell phones, and never permitted laptops during his 25 years at Boston College, he said, long before social media entered the picture. But he understands that wearable technology, like Google lenses and AI pendants might get past him.
Rutgers leaving AI strategy up to faculty
Michele Norin, Rutgers University’s chief information officer and facilitator of an AI steering committee consisting of faculty, researchers and students, said its too early in the AI boom for the university to define a policy about AI adoption and use in the classroom.
The committee expects to release its report in the spring. Norin said she would stand by a policy that supports faculty decisions on incorporating or fending off AI in their classroom.
“Our approach has been that faculty members decide what their rules of the road are for their classes. That’s how it works,” Norin said. “Since the dawn of higher education, faculty members are responsible for deciding what goes on in the classroom.
“We respect that from an institutional perspective,” she said. “But we do have moments when you have to find a little bit of a balance with a new technology,” noting that it was too early to make any predictions about what those might be.
“We have not reached necessarily a consensus on that viewpoint,” Norin said.
Making tests and lectures AI-resistant
AI has turned us into “paranoid police officers,” Moosavi told NorthJersey.com, because professors are constantly checking for AI-generated work.
The college classroom of 2026 will see faculty unleashing changes to make their tests, lectures and interactions “AI-resistant.” Moosavi and Rotella said this has only increased their workload.
“We’ve been trying to play Whack a Mole with AI for a few years now,” Moosavi said. He has had students insert two quotations from each text, cited properly, and with page numbers.
“And people will still take all of that and plug it all into a chatbot, and then copy and paste the answer back. It’s an exercise in stupidity for everyone,” he said. “I’m not getting anything out of reading these things. They’re not getting anything out of doing the exercise.”
“I’ve basically done away with those things,” he said. He conducts testing in class using a LockDown browser, a custom browser that blocks all other content when in use. Test formats have shifted from long essays to in-class short answers and commentary.
The old Iranian texts he teaches are not yet “cannibalized” by chatGPT, he said, so he can still assign long essay answers for those, but most content is ready to be regurgitated by AI — much of it with errors and fabrications, Moosavi said.
The war for attention
The struggle to preserve academic integrity returns more and more educators to solving that other lodestar — holding the attention of a generation of students in the digital age who grew up with social media.
The student who has a cell phone with TikTok constantly on is a challenge, said Moosavi. “And I’m not against the content of TikTok,” he said. “I’m against what it’s done to people’s attention spans — students entering college but have never read a full book, or who think of bound books as these anachronistic sort of artifacts from a different era.
“That’s, for me, the most troubling part, and AI is just one part of that story, in my opinion,” he said.
Using AI to write answer essays isn’t great, but reading AI summaries for class “is even more damaging because there’s so much happening inside your mind when you read, cognitively,” Rotella said. He isn’t averse to AI, or students using it in other situations or classes. He just does not see an application for it in his courses yet.
“My response is really to emphasize what happens in class between people, between students and faculty,” Rotella said.
More colleagues are buying into Rotella’s laptop-free and Moosavi’s cell phone-free model of class lectures, they both said. Moosavi retained laptops partly to not have to decipher handwriting. Tackling AI by removing technology and reintroducing blue book exams has grown in popularity among colleagues too, said Moosavi.
“I think that that’s in part a function of the fact that all this AI doom and gloom caused people to spend a lot of time this past summer thinking about their teaching and thinking about what makes the experience of the classroom valuable,” Rotella said, “and — I would argue — more and more precious.”
