It’s graduation season. At ceremonies across the country, valedictorians, salutatorians, student council presidents, and school administrators are giving speeches to commend millions of high school graduates on their good work, encourage them to savor this moment of achievement, and go forth in a spirit of gratitude and pride.
Typically, these speeches rarely stray from pre-approved messages stressing inclusion, positivity, and general affirmations. After going through the gauntlet of censors, what mostly comes out is nearly always some mix of platitudes about seizing opportunities, enjoying the journey, and persevering through adversity. Nevertheless, in past years, the speeches still expressed the students’ own voice on some level — and I would know since I was usually the one teaching them how to write.
Sadly, we can now have little confidence that we are hearing the student’s voice rather than the hollow, generic drone of ChatGPT. There have been a few prominent examples of speakers beginning with AI-composed speeches and then reverting to their own poignant comments, but now even superintendents reportedly deliver interchangeable AI slop that means absolutely nothing.
Of course, most people might excuse this development, seeing that these speeches were mostly pointless formalities anyway. But what if empty canned speeches written by a machine really do reflect the mind (or mindlessness) of the person giving the speech? What if the use of AI for making speeches and for other tasks reveals that many of today’s top students are really dishonest frauds?
While cheating has always existed, particularly among elite students jockeying for rank, this problem has exploded in recent years, not only with the rise of AI, but with the increasing popularity of inferior educational programs that effectively facilitate academic dishonesty. Whereas unscrupulous students in the past cheated on various assessments, they usually had enough intelligence to avoid detection and feign mastery. Today’s cheaters lack even this much initiative. They now simply ask AI to complete the assignment and submit their work — it obviously helps that many schools have gone paperless after the Covid shutdowns.
It is now possible for otherwise mediocre students to make their way through advanced courses, cheating the whole time. Worse still, they can continue this way in their college courses, where their professors may take even less action against academic dishonesty than teachers at K-12 schools. Sure, some professors might take to the pages of The Atlantic and complain about their elite students who never read a whole book in their lives, but many will never seriously challenge these students, much less fail them.
Not so long ago, such chronic cheaters were unmasked when they took their SAT or AP exams, but this has changed. The SATs are continually altered to accommodate ever weaker testers, hiding how much decline in learning has set in. Moreover, students can learn to game the test and earn a respectable score by taking a 6-week course at a test prep center down the street.
In the case of AP exams, many students are actively circumventing them by enrolling in dual-credit programs (community college courses offered at the high school level), which have no standardized exam at the end of the course. In response, College Board has made its exams easier to pass, but this won’t be enough.
Although this may seem like a small policy change, this undermining of AP programs at public schools through misguided incentives will have massive consequences for incoming college freshmen, along with kids ready to do full-time work. Our best and brightest are now wasting their formative years in classes not designed for them.
In AP courses, students are forced to work hard every day in order to have the knowledge, skills, and intellectual stamina to pass their exams. By contrast, in dual-credit classes, because there is no standardized exam and because the adjunct professors are paid a small pittance to teach the class, the workload is often laughably light, and there is essentially zero deterrence for cheating.
This means that students can sleep through instruction, submit AI-generated work for the handful of assignments they have, and somehow finish the semester with college credit and a perfect grade for the class. Sure, this credit and grade are worthless since the student didn’t actually learn anything or do any work, but schools will pretend this isn’t the case and parents are only looking at the grades. In the short term, everyone (except the AP teachers who no longer have any students) wins.
In the long term, everyone loses (still including the AP teachers who warned about this) since even the top graduates who have ostensibly earned so many college credits are functionally illiterate, innumerate, and generally ignorant about everything. The only thing that distinguishes them from their lower-ranked classmates is their greater willingness to cheat and lie about their work. These seeming luminaries will now depend on AI to do everything for them, and none of their teachers or professors will stop them, let alone call it out, because it would break the illusion that their school is preparing students for the challenges of the world beyond.
This leaves it up to parents and school boards to speak up and demand something better, something real, before it’s too late. Otherwise, they can expect their children’s diplomas and future prospects to be as hollow and meaningless as the speeches given at their graduation ceremony.
