While at a grocery store over the weekend, I came across a pair of Year 10 girls from a nearby private school. They were shopping on a limited budget and were attempting to work out if they could afford the selection of snacks in their basket.

They only had two items, but the task proved to be a challenge.

‘Siri!’ chirped one of the girls, speaking to her ‘smart’ phone. ‘What’s $5 plus $8?’

In Year 10 you’re around 15 or 16 years old. We had basic addition down pat in kindergarten. At least they were mildly embarrassed by the event as I was not the only adult lofting an eyebrow in their direction. It costs $34,000 for Year 10 at that school and somehow I don’t think parents are getting value for money.

This is not an isolated incident. Naplan – a shadow of the HSC – recently offered a glimpse of an education system crumbling under activism, poor teacher quality, and an over-reliance on technology. Pretty soon kids will be getting a better education sitting on the dirt in the third world in front of a blackboard than in Australian classrooms.

Despite spending more money than ever on each child, our children are slipping down global rankings. They are, sadly, incapable of performing basic tasks in young adulthood.

Students who lack ability are far more likely to cheat, if only out of necessity.

Cheating in the 80s meant casually leaving books off the bibliography after copying un-referenced paragraphs. Cheating in the 00s involved the help of Wikipedia. Cheating in the 10s was all about paying anonymous people online to do the assignment for you. In 2023, cheating involves employing the help of AI bots. It is the laziest pathway through education in history.

Teachers are rightly concerned about large amounts of students using ChatGPT to cheat on assignments and exams. Several Australian states have made efforts to ban ChatGPT in school settings because instead of researching a topic, thinking about it, and then writing an essay – these kids are ‘asking’ ChatGPT to write their assignment just as the girls in the shop outsourced their math to Siri.

It’s effectively plagiarism with a twist. Normally when students are caught doing this sort of thing they are punished severely, failed, forced to re-do the assignment, and issued with a few days of detention. A tough but crucial life lesson.

When did plagiarism lose its stigma and become an accepted ‘cool’ way to behave? Around the same time kids started sticking themselves to roads and forgetting their gender.

Australia has a serious problem with ChatGPT, but a shocking two-thirds of UK children are thought to be cheating in this way.

Good teachers understand this harms the children more than anyone and have been using software to detect ChatGPT content just as they used to use software to catch plagiarists.

In the UK, teachers have been told to stop trying to police ChatGPT in their classrooms because it may be considered racist.

The explanation for this absurdity is that the software used to detect ChatGPT cheating might ‘flag’ children of an ethnic minority background more often than native English speakers.

There is no proof of this and it is unlikely to be true considering content made by ChatGPT sounds like a Wikipedia entry, not someone with broken English. Even if the software was genuinely looking for dodgy quality, the writing skills of native speakers have fallen so low a study should be performed to see if there really is a difference rather than allowing bureaucrats to make directives based on an assumption.

One wonders if the real fear is that if cheating is stopped, a true picture of the terrible education standards will be revealed. If two-thirds of students are cheating, they are unable to perform the task. What’s infinitely worse is these kids have no interest in their own education.

No doubt they are learning this behaviour from their parents.

Lazy adults, who should know better, are routinely employing the AI chatbot to write emails, draft meeting responses, and produce articles. There is no better way of ensuring the boss views you as surplus to requirement than demonstrating how easily you can be replaced by an incredibly stupid piece of software.

If adults want to do that, fine. Depressing, but fine.

However, for society to keep functioning, children need to be given a proper education and that means preventing industrial levels of cheating.

Most readers have probably worked out the answer.

Take away computers and force students to complete essays in the classroom with books – like most of us did back in the ‘old days’. Cut out the gender studies, Blak Activism, and ‘global boiling’ and instead use that time for supervised essay writing.

It’ll soon become clear which kids are struggling and which kids are cheating.

Technology is great, but there’s a reason we weren’t allowed to have a calculator until High School and sat the majority of assessments in person with a pen and paper.

The education system will never approve of this because it would show every parent exactly how badly ‘modern’ education has failed their kids. What else can we expect when half of our college students are suspected of cheating with ChatGPT? Soon we will have cheaters raising cheaters. Where is the next generation of new knowledge going to come from? Not these kids.

---

Flat White is written and edited by Alexandra Marshall.

Get 10 issues for just $10

Subscribe to The Spectator Australia today for the next 10 magazine issues, plus full online access, for just $10.

SUBSCRIBE 10 issues for $10 REGISTER 3 articles a month

Already a subscriber? Log in