Update on UWO Cheating Story

I said I would report more on this as things developed, and although not much new of substance has arisen, here is my report anyway.

The next publication day after the original cheating story, the Freeps ran a story titled

Western student explains why she used AI on closed-book exam

Students feel pressure to achieve high grades, especially those who want to go to medical school, the Western University student said

Pressure to achieve high grades is of course a brand new phenomenon in 2026, so this was a very useful story. It contains a lot of self-justification by one student who took the exam, like:

“In certain situations people just want to do well, students, and I fall into this category, that knows cheating is not right, you just go along with it because the robot is going to be better at wording of a professional essay,”

Wanting to do well is also a never-before-seen feeling. Of course the Freeps talked to an expert. This one –

Daniel Adleman, an assistant professor in the teaching stream in writing and rhetoric at the University of Toronto, researches ChatGPT and academic integrity.

Definitely an expert. One quote from him –

“It would be naive to assume on the part of any institution that an un-proctored exam is the right way to go.”

There ya go – the cheating was the prof’s fault.

I will come back to that thought, but yesterday the Freeps published yet another related story, this one titled

In an AI and online exam age, how can students resist urges to cheat?

University students need to have “almost superhuman” strength to resist cheating on online exams, says an expert in cheating.

Only Superman or Wonder Woman could realistically be expected not to cheat on an online exam. An expert says so.

Not a surprise, it is not at all hard to find faculty and other experts who will absolve students of all blame when it comes to academic dishonesty.

Another quote from this piece:

“There is just too much temptation, and the temptations are so strong,” said James M. Lang, author of Cheating Lessons, a book exploring the root causes of student cheating, and a professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

“I think you will never get 100 per cent compliance in un-proctored, online assessment and blaming the students in that context seems to be shortsighted,” he said. “Temptations are so built into the system that it also seems like entrapment sometimes to me.”

Entrapment, yes indeed. You know, it’s like when retailers just put merchandise out on the shelf – how can any reasonable person not just stuff it under their coat and walk out? How can you blame them if they do? That is why shoplifters should never be prosecuted.

And those packages from Amazon that get left on porches all the time; if you’re walking by, how can you be expected not to just run up and grab them? And of course we have all had the experience of getting a restaurant bill that has a couple of items you ordered left off of it. It is utter nonsense to expect people to tell the server about the mistake before paying, obviously.

Here’s a quote from the article that goes in another direction:

“We have entered the brave new world of ethical and moral decay in education,” said Appleby College teacher Dave Suchanek. “AI is dumbing down our students.”

I disagree with that first sentence only to the extent that I saw us entering that world long ago. AI is just one more way to walk through it, but the path of ethical decay has been well-trod in universities for years.

Foolishly thinking the Freeps might be interested in reporting on academic dishonesty at UWO and in general, I wrote a letter to the editor after that first story appeared. I rarely do this, in large part because when I do the letters are never printed. I expect that is because my letters don’t fit well into whatever narrative the Freeps is pushing on any issue. This time I wanted to encourage them to go beyond the statements of official spokesmen at UWO regarding this issue. As you can see from the two follow-up articles they did publish, they have not done this. Just more quotes from ‘experts’, none of them knowing anything about what actually goes on at UWO.

I expected as much, but since I wrote and sent it, I re-print my entire letter below, just so you know what I did write. In vain, as it happens.

Regarding the story titled ‘Overwhelmingly clear students cheated on exam: Western Professor’ (May 16). I could only laugh at the statement from UWO’s  spokesperson Alison Springate that “Academic integrity is the cornerstone of Western University.”

I would have laughed just as loud at such a statement before I retired from the faculty at UWO in 2022, before AI was widely available to students. As it happens, I was at a social gathering of current and retired UWO faculty the evening that story came out, and my reaction to Springate’s assertion was, so far as I could tell, universally shared in that group. One person suggested that UWO had gone into the business of ‘just printing diplomas’.

The Free Press might want to ask people not paid to parrot the UWO administration’s party line what they think of that administration’s commitment to academic integrity. In my last years as a faculty member, it was close to non-existent.

I signed it as a Professor Emeritus at UWO, just so they could check my bona fides if they wished. I’m still on the Econ website as such. I doubt they bothered.

Postscript:

My thanks to the Free Press’s TGIF column for this. Here is a headline from a recent story on the BBC website: Selling children to survive: Afghan fathers forced to make impossible choices

Abdul tells us he is willing to sell his girls for marriage, or for domestic work. “If I sell one daughter, I could feed the rest of my children for at least four years,” he says.

And, lest we forget who is in charge in Afghanistan….

The choice to sell daughters over sons, is because culturally sons are widely seen as future breadwinners, and here in Afghanistan, with the Taliban’s restrictions on education and work for women and girls, it is even more pronounced.

It’s cultural, don’t you see? The Taliban, well, that just makes the culture ‘more pronounced’

Besides, the BBC and all right-thinking people know who is really at fault here –

The US – once the top donor to Afghanistan – cut nearly all aid to the country last year. Many other key donors have also significantly reduced contributions, including the UK.

What does using AI to do better on a test have in common with selling a daughter?

‘It’s not my fault.’