I have not paid attention to test taking since the 1980s when I was an anthropology graduate student at the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa. Back then, part of my job as a teaching assistant for anthropology professors Alice Dewey and Fred Blake was to monitor exams to make sure the undergraduates did not cheat.

In the pre-internet era, our occasional cheaters used primitive methods such as leaning forward to crib the answers of a better-prepared student sitting in front of them or they wrote answers they expected to need on small pieces of paper or “cheat sheets.”

The most technological and sneaky would record information they figured might help them on tapes in their Sony Walkman players. That was easy enough to stop: We prohibited students from listening to portable cassette players during exams.

All that pales in comparison to what students can do today if they want to avoid the hard work of writing and learning. With a few taps of the fingers they can prompt AI chatbots such as Gemini, Copilot and ChatGPT to almost instantly turn out informed answers on essay tests. And then they can elevate the quality of their writing by using AI writing assistants like Grammarly and Hemingway. After that, they can use AI paraphrasing tools to humanize content to help them sneak by AI detecting tools.

AI cheating is happening at schools and universities all over the country.

I got interested in the issue when I came across a Facebook post by archaeologist and University of Hawaiʻi professor Patrick Vinton Kirch.

Kirch wrote on Facebook: “Unfortunately, students have come to depend on AI. Over the past year I’ve had several cases of students using AI to write the answers to their essay test questions. As has been widely noted, university students increasingly don’t want to read, and just use AI to produce a quick summary of the subject matter.”

Unintelligible Handwriting Is A Challenge

When I called Kirch to find out more, he said beginning this fall he plans to have students hand write their exam answers in blue books to make sure their writing is not AI-generated.

Kirch told me he can tell when a student has used a chatbot because the grammar is flawless, the writing overly polished and the essay includes information that was never part of his lectures or the articles he assigned.

He laughs about the challenge he faces now having to deal with the unintelligible handwriting of many of today’s students.

Kirch is a 1968 Punahou School graduate. He taught for 25 years at the University of California at Berkeley before he returned to Hawaiʻi in 2019 to teach as a tenured professor at UH Mānoa. He is a widely published author of journal articles and books on Pacific archaeology.

Another UH Mānoa professor, Christopher Bae, who teaches biological anthropology, has been using blue books for exams since the spring semester to try to prevent students using AI to write their test answers for them.

“Most students are ok with this move because not all students like when other students use AI to do their work,” Bae wrote to me in an email. “Many students I have talked to agree that this is a form of cheating and taking the easy way out.”

Kirsten Vacca, an assistant professor of historical archaeology at UH West Oʻahu, said she has tried to prevent chatbot cheating by not giving traditional tests and instead using gamification assessments to measure her students’ understanding and also by having them do creative projects such as podcasts and films to show they are able to apply what they’ve learned.

But she said as more and more students return to the West Oʻahu campus for in-person learning, she expects to use blue book exams for written essay tests for her upper division students to show they have fully grasped more difficult concepts.

When I told my neighbor, Dao McGill, who graduated from UH with a degree in computer science in December, that professors were now requiring written essay tests, she didnʻt know what a blue book was.

They are booklets with blue covers with white lined pages that were once widely used in higher education for essay exams.

Interestingly, the exam books UH orders for its instructors are not blue but green, maybe in keeping with the school’s colors.

‘AI Will Be A Part Of Students’ Lives’

The Wall Street Journal recently featured an article on the return to blue books titled: “They Were Every Student’s Worst Nightmare. Now Blue Books Are Back.”

Universities everywhere are grappling with how to balance the enormous educational opportunities AI offers with its inherent risks such as security leaks, making sure students have equal access to AI chatbots and their increasing use by students to cheat.

ChatGPT was launched Nov. 30, 2022, and many of the other currently popular chatbots arrived soon after in 2023.

“AI technology is changing minute by minute. The challenge is what guardrails to put around it,” said Kim Siegenthaler, senior advisor to UH President Wendy Hensel.

The university has drafted a new policy on artificial intelligence, which is under review.

“AI will be a part of students’ lives,“ Siegenthaler said. “They need to know how to use it effectively. When they graduate it will be necessary for them to enter into today’s workforce.“

Former UH President David Lassner put it this way in a phone interview: “Chatbot cheating is worrisome when students use it as a substitute for thinking, but the university would be doing students a disservice if it did not concentrate on teaching them to take advantage with appropriate use of all that AI can offer them.”

Lassner served 11 years as UH president before he retired last year. Information technology is his academic specialty. He previously served as the UH’s first chief information officer and first vice president for information technology.

When Hensel was one of two finalists vying to replace Lassner, she touted her skills and interest in integrating AI in all classes when she spoke at a forum at UH Hilo.

She said then, “AI is the new electricity” that will affect every student in every discipline, enhancing their employment possibilities. “There is a premium for employers who bring in new employees who understand how to use that technology.”

Hensel’s plan is to expand AI use in UH classrooms in all disciplines. An invitation was put out this spring to professors with an incentive of $1,000 each to create a single new assignment in an existing class that involves AI use. More than 100 instructors submitted ideas with 50 selected this month as winners.

It is a revolutionary time in education. It seems so simple and old-fashioned to think back to being a UH teaching assistant when our assigned reading was from books and journal articles, our tools were electric typewriters, and cheating on tests was so obvious and easy to catch.