How to get students to stop using AI.

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Posted May 28, 2025 at 9:15 PM UTC

James D. Walsh’s excellent New York Magazine piece about college students cheating their way through school with ChatGPT has provoked a lot of education discourse, much of which reluctantly surrenders that AI is here and that there’s no way to stop people from using it. The takes have ranged from sheepishly accepting that reality to wholeheartedly embracing it — reimagining curriculum, the campus, the entirety of the liberal arts. But in Ted Gioia’s excellent newsletter The Honest Broker, he proposes a different solution. What if we just shut down cheating by making things analog?

Once you get past the flexing about Oxford (sounds like a nice school), Gioia’s answers are actually smart and obvious: Make students write things by hand. Grill students verbally. Raise the difficulty of tests (and also mandate they be handwritten or oral). What he’s outlined is as much a rebuke of AI in the classroom as it is a doubling down of how education used to be: test kids on what they know, and leave it up to them to figure out how to succeed. Maybe they would figure out a new way to cheat, but at least they would be thinking creatively.

5 Ways to Stop AI Cheating

[honest-broker.com]

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