While I applaud the professor for his ingenuity and understand we cannot live in a society that condones cheating, you might not be surprised to learn I had a similar incident in high school way back in 1994 and can sympathize with both sides.
Last week, a professor at Alcorn State University in Mississippi, Dr. Jason Gibson came up with an ingenious way to catch students using AI to cheat on their term papers. Rather than relying on technology to defend against technology as others have done, he employed a simple false flag: The email he sent to the class with instructions included a hidden sentence unrelated to the paper comparing the digital age to the industrial revolution, asking the students to embed the word “Madagascar” somewhere in their submission. The reasoning was simple. The students who were going to use AI to write the paper wouldn’t bother to look too closely at the instructions. Instead, they would copy the email and paste into their AI engine of choice, completely unaware of the false flag lurking in the text. The AI, however, would take it as a literal instruction and dutifully embed the word somewhere in the output. Figuring the lazier students wouldn’t bother to read their papers before submitting them, Dr. Gibson concluded that any which included the word “Madagascar” would have to have been generated by AI, but I doubt even he was prepared for the true magnitude of the problem. “Thirty-two of my 35 students between two classes failed a portion of their midterm because they all used AI to generate their entire response,” he claimed in a series of TikTok videos explaining what happened afterwards. “Apparently they didn’t proofread it.” Some of the papers were, shall we say, quite interesting in their usage, boasting phrases such as “Madagascar floats sideways through the afternoon” and “Madagascar purple bicycle whispers to the ceiling.” For obvious reasons, many commended the professor for smoking out the cheaters. As one commenter put it “You’ve taught them an important lesson on integrity, Sir. Well done!” while another simply called him a hero.
Personally, I have a slightly more nuanced take. While I applaud the professor for his ingenuity and understand we cannot live in a society that condones cheating, I’m also a veteran of the car business, where such things were applauded rather than condemned and fraud was practically a way of life, something to be proud rather than ashamed of. As a result, you might not be surprised to learn I had a similar incident in high school way back in 1994, which seems to have occurred shortly after the Bronze Age, which was noted was collapsing in The Odyssey. At the time, we didn’t have AI or even the modern internet, only Bulletin Board Services useful mainly for early online phonography and primitive chatrooms accessed through dial up modems, but digital encyclopedias stored on CD-ROMs, known as Microsoft Encarta – yes, those old disks you would load in like plate in an electronic dishwasher and then wait for them to spin up – served the same purpose for would-be cheaters, perhaps even more so because many teachers weren’t aware such things existed or how easily they could be used to print out fully formed papers. To an enterprising student with a relatively ill-defined or at least immature moral code who hated being a student in the first place, believing he had better things to do like sell cars and generally fuck around with this friends, the opportunity was irresistible, especially after I was already accepted to college and simply wanted to coast through the spring semester.
There was one teacher, however, who knew me well enough to know I was up to something when I quite unexpectedly submitted a comprehensive review of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity as my physics term paper in the second half of senior year after spending the first half refusing to do much of anything. To be sure, the teacher in question, Mr. Ferro was a great guy and we had an overall great relationship for the two years I was his student. He’d had my older brother a few years earlier, who claimed he looked something like the old New York City political machine head, Boss Tweed – short, stocky yet well-built with floppy grey hair – and the name stuck. In addition to teaching physics, he also headed the science league and for teacher and student, we spent a lot of time together throughout my junior and senior year, making him aware of my strengths and weaknesses better than most. Given one of those weaknesses was a generally lackadaisical attitude towards all things school related at the time, Mr. Ferro was immediately convinced I must’ve copied this incredibly polished, well-researched paper from somewhere, and he dutifully set out to find the source. Though he was an incredibly intelligent man, able to derive most equations from memory, by hand, and have fun while doing so, he wasn’t particularly technology savvy and was unaware of CD-ROM encyclopedias or how they could be used for such nefarious purposes. He was, however, willing to devote a lot of time to the task, apparently scouring old paper-based encyclopedias and even enlisting his son in the effort. I have no idea how much time they spent digging it up, but somehow his son found the original entry in the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia Microsoft Encarta was based on, a set that I’d never even heard of despite having multiple encyclopedias at home.
Perhaps needless to say, I was completely unaware of this at the time, going about my usual business of not doing any school work. In fact, I wasn’t even in class when he announced his findings. I can’t remember where I was, probably playing hooky with a case of beer somewhere or something equally stupid, but as I was told by almost everyone afterwards, a triumphant Mr. Ferro handed my paper to a fellow student, mysteriously opened the encyclopedia on his desk, a typically thick and old tome, like an ancient spell book out of Dungeons & Dragons, and asked the student to begin reading in a dramatic, near theatrical fashion. After the student – I forget who, I’d like to say it was a woman I’m still close friends with who was something of a teacher’s pet and went onto Princeton then Harvard Medical School and I wish I still had the paper – finished the first paragraph, he completed the next from the encyclopedia, then repeated the process several times before proudly proclaiming that he’d finally gotten me, as though he was Batman and I was the Joker, or perhaps Superman and Lex Luthor. While none of the students were surprised, many just laughed, a few were thrilled thinking I’d finally be held to some kind of account, more on that in a moment, all of them wondered what would happen from there. Had he finally been caught in something he simply couldn’t wiggle his way out of? Would he fail? Would it be even worse, ending up on his permanent record, or something equally bad? Even in the days before cell phones and text messages, the story spread like wildfire in the clique that we might politely refer to as geeks of which I was a card carrying member despite my extracurricular proclivities.
By the time I dragged my ass to school the next day, I’d heard what happened in varying degrees of detail several times from several different people and was more than prepared when Mr. Ferro asked me to meet him after class. As with so many things from so long ago – upwards of three decades now – I can’t say with any surety what I thought or felt before this meeting. I’m not going to suggest I wasn’t at least a little frightened, intimidated, or whatever word you choose, or the least bit concerned about what may come of it, but at the same time, I was extremely cocky, cocksure, confident, and downright arrogant, almost blindingly so, believing without question I could extricate myself from any possible situation. Still, this was a little different, when Mr. Ferro sat me down across one of those large laboratory tables popular in biology, chemistry, and physics back then, the look in his eye more confusing than sad. Clearly, he knew that I knew, and wisely chose to dispense with a lengthy explanation of what led to the meeting. Instead, he remarked how I appeared to have put as little effort as possible into the paper, saying something to the effect, “It was copied paragraph for paragraph, word for word, punctuation mark for punctuation mark. Couldn’t you have at least used the thesaurus or something to change a few things?” as though that would have made the blatant plagiarism and cheating somehow better. At this point, I realized that he might’ve found me out, but he still didn’t really know what I’d done. Rather than merely copying it from Encarta to Word, slapping a title page on it, and pressing the print button, he thought for some reason that I’d retyped the paper from the original source. In his mind, the retyping was some form of effort at least – I’d read it after all, rather than having no idea what it said – and because I’d expended some effort, I should have gone a little further and changed a couple of words here and there, maybe updated a few sentences. While you might find it hard to believe all of this flashed through my mind in just a couple of seconds as a 17 year old – I might’ve just turned 18 – I’d been in the car business since I was 14 and was reasonably good at reading people and leaping to conclusions, even if they weren’t always the right ones by any means. In any event, I certainly wasn’t going to disabuse him of the notion that I’d put in a small amount of effort. Instead, I responded rather cryptically and nonsensically, “Boss, I didn’t want to insult your intelligence,” pretending that it was somehow better to have cheated so plainly than try to hide it.
By any standard, the look on his face at that remark was rather confused, unsure what he should say, and if I recall correctly he didn’t really say anything. Instead, the conversation ended and he left me hanging as to what would happen next. Once again, I’m not going to say I wasn’t concerned in the aftermath, but it had gone better than expected, at least he believed I’d have done something and hadn’t threatened to inform the Dean or anyone else. About a week later, he announced everyone’s grade and as was his habit, the same as the year before in fact except with a different number, he gave every other student a 93 and me a 39 because he believed I’d taken the time to type it. Rather incredibly, this was the only grade the entire marketing period, but as I said, he liked me. While I should have failed by the math alone, he passed me with a 70 and the topic was never mentioned again – at least by Mr. Ferro, for this was far from the only instance of the kind. By the time I was a senior, after several years of experience, we’d turned cheating into an artform and a substantial operation known internally as “The Cheating Machine.” Though I was a terrible student, a bad role model for my peers, a merry prankster, and something of a rebel whose only cause was amusement, I’ve always been a social creature and never kept the fruits of my nefarious labor to myself. Instead, my close friends and I built a network of classmates who would pilfer tests, share work, pass answers to each other, copy papers, and generally pool our resources to beat the system however we could. I even enlisted my girlfriend, who was in college at the time, obtained papers from others who had graduated before me, anyone and everyone in every class that might help. No one was turned away, and one of our crowning achievements was when we recruited the number two student in the class (believe it or not, I was number 10 despite all this), who went onto MIT, to assist in an operation surrounding the AP Biology final. Perhaps needless to say, there were also missteps, such as when we came up with a complicated set of codes – tapping pencils and other various sounds – to communicate answers to a student in AP Calculus. It went extremely well for the first half of the test even with the teacher, another great guy, occasionally craning his neck to see what all the tapping in the back of the room was about, but in our lack of wisdom, we forgot that we needed a code for reset or to communicate the number of the question, causing the whole thing to fall apart by the end when no one knew what question the others were on.
Perhaps equally needless to say, there were several – if not many students – who hated it with a passion, especially as it was an open secret even among the teachers and nobody really seemed to care as our high school was something like the Wild Wild West. As a sophomore, a teacher actually told me – another one I liked and was close with, believe it or not there were only handful who disliked me, though those that did do so with a passion – that she’d noticed a student cheating more as the year went on and simply remarked that the second half Honors Chemistry was more complicated than the first, like it was no big deal and to be expected. In some classes, we would grade each other’s tests and wouldn’t even bother to fill them in until we were on the grading part, ensuring everyone got a high score and bragging about it. Junior year things could’ve been said to reach a pinnacle of sorts. The machine was close to fully operational by then and we’d procured the AP US History final via near blind luck, when a copy of last year’s test was just sitting out there for some reason, waiting to be taken. The test itself was a monster to even behold, somewhere over thirty pages long, more of a book than anything else, consisting of hundreds of multiple choice questions, so we divided it up among about ten students and created cheat sheets for all in the two weeks prior to the exam – my portion, I outsourced to my poor girlfriend to be entirely honest and for all of us, some of the questions we so obscure, we were still lost. On the day of the exam, most of my fellow cheats pretended they actually took the test, flipping through each page and going slowly as though they were reading the questions before deciding the answers, but I filled in my scantron sheet in about ten minutes without even opening the thing and called it day without a care in the world – until on the last day of school, the ringleaders of the group – me and two friends – were talking to the teacher, another good guy who liked us a lot and even let me sleep in class as he was incredibly boring, having one of those voices that served as a sedative with a greyish mustache to match. With a sly look on his face, he remarked that “he knew something about this final that I could make a big deal about,” prompting the three of us to play incredibly dumb. What? What could you possibly know? He finished his statement without responding to our queries by saying, “but I’m not going to” and gave me a 99.
Years later, when I told my wife these stories, her first reaction was to ask me what the fuck I was thinking. Clearly, you could’ve done the work yourself, but instead you chose to cheat and perhaps even worse, you made a sort of game out of it. Didn’t you realize what you were doing was wrong and that if you got caught, it could’ve impacted the rest of your life? Setting aside that I did get caught – more than once – and it didn’t really impact my life save for a good story, I can only answer that, yes, in principle I understood it to be wrong, but in practice, I didn’t really care. It was, in many ways, more fun and exciting this way, to cheat the system rather than conform to it, believing I was a real life version of Ferris Bueller or something, who was an inspiration to us all in that generation, and it freed up a lot of my time to pursue other interests. Ironically, I wasn’t quite as lazy as I made myself out to be during this period. Yes, there was a lot of fucking around, but that represented a broad range of activities. I was reading around a thousand pages a week on my own, everything from Dante to the latest science fiction book. I was working almost every night, and I was heavily engaged in school activities outside of class. I taught myself 3D animation and early modelling. Though I was never an athlete, I was in several plays before taking on community theater, mock trial, science league, math league, the year book committee, and more. The time I saved not doing any school work was invested in that sense in what I preferred to do. Of course, that’s a rationalization not a justification, but as I mentioned earlier, attempting to recreate my mental state at that age to truly understand why I did the things I did despite that some of them could’ve had serious consequences is impossible. It’s hard enough to do now.
While I have these memories and some of them seem like yesterday, the decision making process is completely unclear, and I can only say that I did what I did, even as I certainly wouldn’t do today. In many ways, this is what it means to be young and dumb without a care in the world, when the future is either some far off thing or what your plans are for the weekend, and the plans are more important than anything else. Thus, I can sympathize with the cheating students. I was one of them myself and probably much worse, perhaps even an innovator of the art, coming up with new techniques the teachers weren’t even aware existed, same was we did in the car business when it came to other forms of cheating, but that’s another story. At the same time, I can appreciate the position I put my teachers in back then and the position the professor, Dr. Gibson is in right now. Catching a student in the act isn’t an easy thing, especially one you know could do better and should do better, but students, generally, aren’t adults either. Their brains aren’t fully developed and they have a tendency to make poor decisions, as I and many others, including classmates that went on to great schools and careers. The only advice I can give the professor is to use his own judgement and to be merciful, hoping the incident is a learning experience rather than a life altering one. At least, that’s the way it was for me.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 