AI Tools Can Help Stop Cheating in Class

In the early 2000s, a group of teachers and I worked on a grant for an online school in Louisiana. We explored the best ways to help both students and teachers succeed, but the grant allowed schools to select only certain students who met specific criteria. One of the first schools to try this was Riverside Academy, and many of its students were in honors or gifted programs.

Back then, kids were already adept at using the internet. As a fine arts teacher, I had to create lessons that blended research with creative expression. Some students were under a lot of pressure to perform, so they turned to the web for shortcuts. When we assigned PowerPoint projects, I was shocked to see bright students copy entire websites onto a single slide. Those were easy to spot as plagiarism, but other students would paste whole paragraphs and shuffle the words to hide their source. The learning platform we used, Blackboard, recognized this problem and added plagiarism‑detection software.

I began using that same technology to catch copied work. Even after all these years, the pattern stays the same: students will cheat when they feel pushed to win. It is up to parents and teachers alike to address this habit, because cheating has always been part of human behavior.

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