“How AI Has Changed Student Cheating – And How to Respond”

Podcast Reflection:

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/edsurge-podcast/id972239500?i=1000683061969

Michael suggested I access a book, titled “The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI.” He also recommend this podcast that addresses the themes in the book. I enjoyed listening to the podcast because the author of the book and the podcast guest, Tricia Bertram Gallant, has “hit the nail on the head” when it comes to the current collision of artificial intelligence and education. Tricia suggests there is no way around this collision, the only way is through it; which requires an enormous upheaval of our current classroom curriculum and assessments. The podcast is exactly relevant to my thesis project because she contextualizes the current situation that educators face and also provides potential solutions and ways forward. Although she is speaking primarily about post-secondary institutions, the issues are similar to the issues we are facing at a high school level. Tricia highlights that many professors are adjusting the best way they know how, doing in-class writing assignments as assessment rather than essays where students can potentially use AI. Tricia shockingly states that many professors are at the point where they would rather retire than try to tackle these huge shifts in their teaching practices. She uses the analogy that we (educators) are being held hostage on a plane:

“And when it came out, everybody just said, oh professors, stop worrying about cheating. Just redesign your courses and assessments, as if that’s easy to do.

And so I’ve said, it’s like we were being held hostage on an airplane. That we’re flying, while being told we have to rebuild it…”

Tricia Bertram Gallant

(EdSurge Podcast, 2025.)

Here is a screenshot of my Table of Contents in my Thesis Project. Under the red highlighted section is where I would include information from the podcast and Tricia Bertram Gallant’s book. “Challenging the Traditional Views on Knowledge and Assessment”. I might change this title to something else, like: “Challenging the Status Quo” or “Challenging Curriculum, Knowledge, and Assessment”

In the podcast, Tricia goes on to highlight three main takeaways:

1. Learning Outcomes & Assessment:

In the podcast, she asks the very important questions of, are our courses and our assessments still relevant in the age of AI? We need to be asking ourselves, what is the foundation of knowledge that students need to learn?

“So every discipline is going to need to look at its learning outcomes and say, what’s the foundation of knowledge that students have to learn, even with ChatGPT out there? Then we’ll have to have secure assessments for that, where they can’t use ChatGPT to pretend that they’ve learned it when they haven’t. Then we’ll allow them, we’ll scaffold a cognitive offloading to those tools once they have, like I said, the knowledge and skills to be able to assess the output that they’re getting.

But the problem is right now, students just don’t have that expertise, so they’re just blindly using it. And they’re handing in work that’s just not worthwhile reading, let alone producing. So that’s the first thing.”

Tricia Bertram Gallant

(EdSurge Podcast, 2025.)

2. Process over Product:

Tricia outlines a second issue that we have to address, which is putting the value on the process over the final product. This really is the fundamental purpose behind us having core and curricular competencies be directed at skill rather than content, a theme that I’ve reiterated over the last year and a half of the Master’s! Our curriculum is set up for us to assess skills, but it’s not always put into practice.

“The second thing is we have to figure out ways to assess process more than products. So we have been relying as products for far too long as artifacts of learning, and they’ve been defunct for a while because of internet, because of copying and pasting, because of contract cheating, because of all these things.

But what’s important is, how did this, how, what did the student learn throughout the process? What are the skills they used to get to that product? And we need to be able to assess that piece better.”

Tricia Bertram Gallant

(EdSurge Podcast, 2025.)

3. Upheaval of Current Structure:

Lastly, and perhaps most boldly, Tricia questions the way our education system is set up into disciplines that focus on content knowledge. If put up against GenAI, a student is unlikely to be able to out-think the computer. However, our human abilities should be what we focus on developing so that we can be set apart from the computers vast capabilities. These three points are all reminiscent of the same theme mentioned in the documentary, “Most Likely to Succeed” and other research I’ve come across over the last year and a half. Perhaps the changes we need to make aren’t in alignment with the structure of our current education system and bigger, fundamental shifts need to take place.

“… should we be organized around disciplines anymore, around content knowledge, or should we be organized around human or durable skills that sets us apart from this gen AI, right?

…”So should we be moving towards a competency education model?

…It’s simply out of date, and it’s time to revisit.”

Tricia Bertram Gallant

(EdSurge Podcast, 2025.)

Tricia doesn’t leave us hanging without more solutions to how this huge upheaval might need to unfold. She suggests giving educators and faculty release time to work with instructional designers and revamp the structure of courses to fit a competency-based approach.

Works Cited:

EdSurge Podcast. (2025). How AI Has Changed Student Cheating—And How to Respond [Broadcast]. https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-ai-has-changed-student-cheating-and-how-to-respond/id972239500?i=1000683061969