The Hangout with David Sciarretta
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The Hangout with David Sciarretta
#95 Beyond the Grade: Academic Integrity in the Age of AI
Dr. Tricia Bertram Gallant redefines academic integrity as more than just avoiding cheating—it's cultivating the courage to uphold universal values like honesty, fairness, and respect, even when it's difficult. Her work as Director of the University of California, San Diego Academic Integrity Office and the Triton Testing Center puts her impressive academic scholarship to practical and impactful use.
Check out Dr. Bertram Gallant's latest book (co-authored with David Rettinger) The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching Integrity in the Age of AI
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Welcome to the Hangout Podcast. I'm your host, david Shoretta. I hope you enjoy this show and, if you do, please share it with your friends and family on social media and in the real world. Come on in and hang out. Thank you, dr Bertram Galat. Welcome to the podcast and I really appreciate you giving of your time this morning.
Speaker 2:Sure Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:I'd like to start where we start in all of these conversations, which is with your origin story, where you come from and how that informs who you are today and what you do today.
Speaker 2:Well, I come from Canada born and raised, didn't move to San Diego until the year 2000. And I was 30 at the time, so I am thoroughly Canadian. You might at some point hear a little bit of an accent when I say out about house or sorry, or a, if I'm feeling very Canadian, very Canadian. I guess the short story is I ended up in San Diego because my husband had been working on the West Coast, traveling all the way. We were from Ontario, canada, so traveling all the way from Ontario, and we weren't seeing each other that often. And I was working at the university that I did my bachelor's in and I did my master's in. I knew I wanted to work in higher education, did my bachelor's in and I did my master's in.
Speaker 2:I knew I wanted to work in higher education, still didn't know quite what I wanted to do, but I knew it was time for my PhD, and so we decided for me to apply to schools in his territory so that we could actually live where he was working. And you know, if you're going to move across the continent from Ontario, Canada where else are you?
Speaker 2:going to move other than San Diego, right? So I ended up at the University of San Diego and in a PhD program in ed studies, slash leadership studies, and I don't know if you want me to go into the whole origin story of academic integrity.
Speaker 1:I would love to. Now we're going to do the next question. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:I love this story. So I was in my second year, I was doing some stuff in the School of Education and my dean said to me the dean over in College of Arts and Science needs a PhD student to help him with this conference he's bringing to campus. I need you to go over and help him. I was like, okay, sure. So I went over to help him. His name is Patrick Drinan and he had been dean for like 16 years, I think.
Speaker 2:At that time, a political scientist by training, and we talked about this conference that he was bringing the Center for Academic Integrity Conference, and that was fine. And then we finished that conversation. He said what are you doing your dissertation on? And I said well, actually I'm in a crisis, you know. And I told him. I told him I was in a crisis and I wasn't sure. And and he just looked at me and I do wish his podcast was visual, because he just looked at me with this big, huge grin on his face, like just eyes lit up, and said why don't you do it on academic integrity? And I said because I never heard the phrase before today.
Speaker 2:So this was 2002, fall 2002. And so he was just so enthusiastic he had gone to UVA as an undergrad, which has an honor code, and he was just involved in the Center for Academic Integrity, essentially since it started in 1990, 92. And so I relented and I said well, if you do an independent study with me, I'll look into the literature and the research and see if there's anything interesting there for me. And my independent study paper turned out to be our first journal article together. I joined the board as a grad student with the Center for Academic Integrity. We hosted that first conference in 2003, and the rest is history. I've been in academic integrity ever since.
Speaker 1:So what is academic integrity? I mean, I think, as you experienced when he said that to you, we know what the two words are. Right, yeah, we can break it down that way, but what does it really mean? Because I think about my time in my undergrad. I did my undergrad on the East Coast in Maine, so I had a migratory journey from cold to warm, yes, and I remember there was this I think it was the Judiciary Board which was this board you'd get called to if you somehow were caught cheating. This is way before this is even pre-internet, so this is like whether you forgot to cite something in your paper and pretended it was your own idea, but there was never an explanation to us other than don't cheat, and if you do, you might get kicked out of college. So, like writ large, how do you define academic integrity?
Speaker 2:Well, the International Center for Academic Integrity's definition is what I use. What we use here at UC San Diego is the courage to be, to uphold honesty, fairness, respect, responsibility and trustworthiness, even when it's difficult to do so. And so you'll notice a couple things about that definition. One is not directly related to academics, so it is really focused on the integrity piece of it, and we're intentional about that. It's called the Fundamental Values of Academic Integrity, and my mentor, patrick Drinan, was part of the original iteration of that back in the 90s, and we're intentional about that because what we're trying to display or explain to students is there is no difference between having integrity in academics or in your personal or in your professional life. In order for us to have a democracy, we need to have trust right. We can't have democracy without trust. If I go to a car mechanic, a doctor, whoever, I need to be able to trust that they're telling me what my car or my body needs, not just selling me a drug or selling me a car part even though I don't need it right. So our whole society is built on this idea that we can trust each other at least to some extent. Honesty, respect all of those values are so important, you'll also notice that they're very universal. No matter what country you go to around the world, those values are in the language, those values are considered important, and we might not prioritize them the same way, we might not resolve conflicts between them in the same way, depending on our backgrounds, but it's hard to imagine anybody where they would say, yeah, I want a friend who's dishonest with me, I don't care if I have friends that lie to me. That's just not a thing. And so that's the important part. And so you're right.
Speaker 2:Most people think of academic integrity in the not definition, not cheating, not plagiarizing, and what we're saying is no, academic integrity is. It's an aspiration, it's an activity, it's a goal. It's not easy to do. You have to consciously be thinking about it all the time, just like you have to consciously think about what's the best ethical thing to do as a superintendent, right Like I'm in a dilemma which option should I choose? And so we're really trying to inculcate in people this idea that integrity is not a character and a lack of integrity is not a character flaw. What's a character flaw is pretending that you don't need to work on this and the other character flaw is what's a character flaw is pretending that you don't need to work on this, and the other character flaw is making a mistake and not taking accountability for it and choosing to learn and grow from it. That's the character flaw, but the rest of it is very active. It's very intentional. It requires a lot of self-awareness and willingness to struggle through difficult decisions.
Speaker 1:I love the courage part of that.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:That's genius and a complete paradigm shift for me, mentally and kind of emotionally too right To think about that idea of behaving a certain way even when no one's watching.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's. It kind of reminds me of my grandma. You know, yeah, you know, hey, don't. Don't take a cookie from the cookie jar, not because I told you not to, but because you know. For whatever reason, you know it's not the right thing to do. Nobody's in the house.
Speaker 2:And yes, and we have to sometimes. We need help with courage.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so the example I've been using lately is if you've got a sweet tooth and yet you're trying to get fit and healthy, what's one good thing you should do to start that journey? It's not buying the sweet stuff and putting it in your kitchen, right? You don't buy it, put it in your kitchen and then force yourself to look at it every day, just so you have the courage to resist it. And so we we we do as humans, we're flawed and we do need help to stick with our values, to stick to our goals, to stick with our goals with integrity. And so I say the same thing to teachers, right? We shouldn't say, oh well, it's the courage to have integrity, even though nobody's watching. Therefore, I'm going to give you a homework assignment, and but I'm going to tell you not to use Chachi PT, because you got to have the courage not to use it.
Speaker 2:No, we've got to scaffold those things for people. So if you're starting your workout journey, you just don't buy the stuff and put in your. But after a while you lose your sweet tooth, you're not really craving it anymore, and so you can have it in your house for guests or something like that, and you'll still resist the temptation to eat it and we have. So we have to do the same thing for our kids, for integrity. We can't just throw them in the wild and say be courageous. We have to actually set up some boundaries and some guardrails for them to help them develop that internal motivation to stick with integrity even when nobody's watching.
Speaker 1:That's a great life hack just in all areas. I'm going to leapfrog over your comments about that. Our political system needs to operate correctly, based on trust.
Speaker 2:Well, I said our democracy.
Speaker 1:Our democracy. I take it back, yes, well, given what's happening in the world, I'm going to also leapfrog over that one.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Yes, please do we could do many episodes and I'm sure, as a Canadian, you have other layers of interpretation and I just one of my board members is Canadian, and so we'll, after a board meeting, I'll say, hey, so can I. Can I get the Canadian perspective on this? Yeah, it's an interesting, it's an interesting intellectual experience. Yes, can you talk to us about what I'm not even going to say an average or typical day, because I'd imagine your days are very, are varied, but what might a day look like for you in the, in this office department, et cetera, that you, that you've really sounds like, built over 20 years of your own research and academic exploration, and then not just academic but also real-life action, research and people?
Speaker 2:so I run two offices here that I run, both the Academic Integrity Office and our Triton Testing Center, and both are focused on integrity, right. So we only need testing centers really for degree integrity in terms of does the student have the knowledge and abilities we're assessing for? And so you need a testing center to again create some of the guardrails around that. And so the typical day is obviously I do a lot of meetings with my team. I've got on the academic integrity side I'll stick to that side. I've got a case management team and I've got an education team.
Speaker 2:So the case management folks and myself well, the case management folks deal with all of the allegations of integrity violations that get reported to our office. So faculty are required by Senate policy to report any integrity violations academic integrity violations to our office. So they initiate those cases, they work with the faculty, they and myself and other people in the campus do resolution meetings with students. So I've spent a lot of time over the last two and a half years, as you can imagine, meeting with a lot of students about Gen AI misuse. And then we also do a lot of correspondence and run hearings, as you mentioned earlier. You know a judicial hearing process, although we call them academic integrity reviews because it's not a legal process.
Speaker 2:So we try to keep legal language out of there. And then my education management team does all of the preventative education with students and faculty. I do most of the stuff with the faculty and we have a robust something I'm super proud of a robust after-education program we call it. So two years after starting here, I created an academic integrity seminar and recruited some students to be peer educators, and so we really believe in leveraging that cheating moment as a teachable moment that we can learn from our mistakes and our failures, moment that we can learn from our mistakes and our failures. And so we do that through our academic integrity seminar, which still exists, which really focuses on teaching students ethical decision-making skills and getting some tools in their toolkit for how to make that better decision next time when you're under stress and pressure.
Speaker 2:But we also have an integrity mentorship program which gives students who are otherwise facing a suspension for an integrity violation a chance to basically prove that they shouldn't be suspended. And so they work one-on-one with a mentor on a particular goal that they get to choose, and it could be related to work or life or school that's up to them. And so we manage a lot of one-on-one appointments, a lot of group appointments. We have other workshops as well, like a collaborating with integrity workshop. So just a robust. So my day varies. I had one-on-one meetings with my staff.
Speaker 1:Yesterday I gave a presentation in a teaching assistant class for one of our academic departments. That was an hour and 20 minutes. I'm recording a lot of podcasts lately, but yeah, so it's varied. Sounds like a developmental experience, right? We hope so. Almost as personalized as someone's own health needs or financial needs or all these areas of our lives that if we resist being intellectually lazy or jump to the knee-jerk conclusion, we actually see that each case is really unique and individualized and we have to see the human behind it.
Speaker 2:Humans. Our students are human beings and they are as flawed as we are. And we know that human beings are notoriously bad at long-term thinking. We're very short-term thinkers. We're kind of like what do I have to do next or how do I get my next goal? We know that our students are obsessed and not their fault obsessed with their grades. The school system, from K through 16, has done that to them.
Speaker 2:And we also know that they, like other humans, will make bad decisions under stress and pressure. And I can tell you, the students are under a lot of stress and pressure, whether that is self-imposed or other-imposed, and so it's no wonder that they'll make bad decisions. And you know what we know from experiential learning theory, from constructivism theory, that people can actually learn the most from their own experiences right. But if it's a painful experience, like getting caught cheating, lots of times we'll bury our heads in the sand or we'll rationalize or justify it. So we don't have to learn from it, because learning is painful and so we know we need to help them learn from it. So that's what all the structure and support is there for is to help them learn and grow from it.
Speaker 1:And I'd imagine that at an elite institution like UCSD. I don't know what the average GPA of incoming students is, but having a daughter who's at an elite college in the Midwest and knowing what her GPA was in high school, especially with AP and weighted courses, people are rolling into college with four point somethings which in high school I was content with a, three, three and I was good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I haven't looked it up for this fall, but in generally speaking, over the last several years, the GPA of the average entering freshman is like a 4.2. It's better than perfect.
Speaker 1:That's right and then that's that mentality of better than perfect, right? What was the impact of COVID? I mean, we know what the impact of COVID was in general on education institutions, but in your specific area, did you see changes in behavior vis-a-vis academic integrity?
Speaker 2:All over the world. I mean, let's think about the pandemic. So if you think about, like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right, what's on the bottom? Security, safety, survival we were all operating on the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs during the pandemic, Every single one of us. Right On top of that, you've still got these extrinsically motivated students who just need the grades, just need the court pass the course, just need to get the degree. And then you layer onto that emergency remote instruction. So a whole bunch of faculty now having to teach online courses that they've never taught before. They don't have time to actually turn them into. You know well-designed online courses. They keep everything the same, so the courses kind of maybe aren't as good as normal. Then you layer on top of that all of the temptations and opportunities available at students' disposal for violating academic integrity. It was the textbook definition of a perfect storm, or probably an imperfect storm. I would say so, yeah, so all over the world cheating shot up.
Speaker 1:You know, you mentioned we're all human and you mentioned professors.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes.
Speaker 1:So what role does? And you just mentioned the design of courses and of course that was a 180 degree swing with a week of notice, pardon me. So that was a highly atypical thing that hopefully we'll have to deal with again in our lives in general. Does the design of a course, the behavior, attitude, et cetera, of a professor all of those pieces that come together? How does that impact student academic integrity?
Speaker 2:Great question. I'm going to do a shameless plug of the book that I have out with my co-author because it's the entire focus of our book. So the Opposite of Cheating.
Speaker 2:Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI. It is written for instructors, with some advice in there for institutions like you must provide faculty with time, training and support to do these things, unlike our K-12 colleagues, who actually get teacher training on how to teach. We know that university faculty in general do not get that. Their PhDs are focused on how to do research, not how to teach, and so that's something that we need to do better at in higher ed. But, to answer your question, directly in the book we go over all of those things directly in the book. We go over all of those things. Instructor or course effects are one of the contributing variables to decisions students make to cheat, and so things like helping students focus on intrinsic motivation rather than their extrinsic motivations right, and so how do you do that? Well, you take a look at your learning objectives for the course. Are they relevant still in the age of AI? Are they meaningful? Are they connected to the activities you're doing in class and the assessments that you've designed? Is there not only an implicit connection, like you've thought about it, but you've explicitly explained to students what the connection is between everything they're doing and the learning objectives. It could include flipping your classroom right and having students engage in real-world problem-solving, more authentic, meaningful assessments to increase their intrinsic motivation?
Speaker 2:Are you doing things to help deal with low self-efficacy? I don't think I can do this, or I don't think I can do it to the level that I want to do it. Are you addressing preconceived notions that girls aren't good in math or whatever the case may be, or organic chemistry is just super hard and most people are going to fail Like? Are you addressing those things? Are you focused on mastery rather than performance? If we give students points, well, you get points for attending, you get points for submitting, you get points for doing this. They're going to perform for you, but they won't necessarily be learning. So, yeah, a lot of things. Do you create a sense of belonging? Basically everything that you've been taught about what helps with inclusivity, what helps with equity, what helps with a sense of belonging also helps with integrity, because all of that helps with learning.
Speaker 1:It's so interesting. I remember when my daughter was in high school. She was a senior and I've been an active person, I've been a runner and all these things. And so senior year she comes to me and she says, hey, would it bother you if I ran the slowest mile at my high school ever? I'm not going to say the name of the high school, it's a great high school. And I said, well, why are you asking me that question? You know how I am, I'm type A. I'm like, try to run as fast as you can.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I said why do you ask me that question? She said, well, the teacher gave us a point system based on how fast we could run a mile and I already have 99.9% of all the points I need and I already have a four point, whatever GPA. So my friend and I are trying to set the record for the slowest mile and still get an A in the class, right, I'm like after I got my ego part, I'm like I can't blame you Because the teacher, by design, made that just a transactional yeah, and it was it. It completely was divorced from what was, I think, probably the original intent of kids doing this mile thing, which I don't know, it's kind of an odd thing to do in PE anyway, but which was supposed to be health and fitness and whatever. And I remember just going out and she graduated with all A's and she's never going to, you know, set the world record in the mile and I don't really care.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's such a great story, and so when we say all of these things, I really want to make sure people listening don't hear blame or condemnation or guilt. Right Again, teachers are humans, so they make the best choices they can in the moment and it's just important for us to all be open to kind of feedback and reflection. Right, and this act of revisiting of what we're doing, because the students we're teaching today are not the students that we taught 20 years ago and so we just had constant. It's just a constant revisiting thing and it's exhausting, but there's no blame here there's. There's just people trying to make the best choices and then, hopefully, learning from them.
Speaker 1:Have you had to go through a process of education and orientation with the faculty? Because I'd imagine that there's a spectrum, age-wise, experience-wise, generation-wise, among your faculty. You see it as among the best and brightest faculty in the world, including Nobel laureates, and doesn't always mean a Nobel laureate's a good professor, if they even ever teach anything. But that's not the point. The best and brightest teach in the UC system, so do you find them showing up and being like here? Here's this case Kid busted in my class. You deal with it.
Speaker 2:We have our faculty area is diverse as the rest of the human population, and so we have a lot of faculty who really, really care about students learning and including learning from their mistakes in their class. It's hard not to. I spend a lot of time helping faculty reframe this. So you typically hear faculty say things like well, I don't want to deal with cheating because I didn't sign up to be a police officer, I signed up to be an educator, Right? And you probably hear teachers.
Speaker 1:I hear the same thing, yep.
Speaker 2:And so I have spent my career, and I'll probably spend the rest of my career saying to faculty great, because I don't want you to take your educator hat off. Actually, I want you to leave it on. And what is your job as an educator? You have two kind of main tasks in what we're talking about. In the small sphere that we're talking about, your task is to facilitate student learning and to assess student learning. Right, those are your two jobs, and so when a student cheats, you can't assess their learning, you can't validate their learning, and so that's part of your educator hat and then also part of your educator hat.
Speaker 2:I hope that you'd want to facilitate their learning from this integrity violation, that you'll want them to learn from their mistake. Just like if they made a spelling mistake or a content error mistake, you give them feedback because you want them to learn from it. Right, you want them to learn and improve their writing or improve their chemistry knowledge or whatever. Why not the same for an integrity violation? Why won't we keep that same growth mindset? Perspective of I'm not saying you should say awesome, a student cheated in my class. Perspective of I'm not saying you should say awesome, a student cheated in my class, but I kind of am. I'm kind of like awesome, the student is now going to have an amazing learning experience. Now I can say that to our faculty, because we actually help students learn after the experience. On many university campuses and probably most K-12 schools, there's not an intentional effort to help the student learn from that mistake, and so that can't be said at every place, but I can say it to my faculty you can keep your educator hat on here.
Speaker 1:Can you talk to us a bit about this concept of having other people do your work for you and now give them credit?
Speaker 1:I in my daughter. My daughter goes to Grinnell College in Grinnell, iowa, and one of the interesting things about their policy is if you receive input or feedback on a paper or an assignment from someone who's not a student and it may even actually be from a fellow student, I don't know, but I remember my daughter sent me a Google Doc and said hey, I'm going to ask you to weigh in on my writing and then I'm going to also cite you as one of the contributors to this paper. And I thought that was a really innovative way of looking at it, because in the real world there's no author who's I mean maybe a few, but most people are always collaborating. You have people you have, uh, thought partners read your stuff. Sometimes they get credit, sometimes they don't. Your, your spouse, all these different, all these different people, um, but then it can go over into the line of like I'm going to pay you what, however much money, to do my work for me while I'm going out to a party.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So how do you address that in your work? Because I'd imagine it shows up in. The Internet is just replete with opportunities to pay people to write your dissertation for you, if you want. I don't know how good they are, they're probably not good at all. People to write your dissertation for you, if you want. I don't know how good they are, they're probably not good at all.
Speaker 2:but who knows now, with the ability of some of the electronic tools that are out, there, yeah, so what you're talking about at the extreme end of things is what we in the industry call contract cheating, and I would. It's hard to estimate, but my colleagues who have done research into this estimate it to probably be a multi-billion dollar industry, international industry, and they are super good marketers. So their websites say things like get homework, help get tutoring.
Speaker 2:Some of them are very blatant now where they'll say you've got better things to do, let us write your essay, plagiarism free, for you um but not only do they just do that on the internet, they will actually um, form a discord chat, pretend that they're in the class and a fellow student with you, and they'll start conversations like hey, hey, everybody, you know what essay we got coming up.
Speaker 2:Does anybody like want help with that? And they kind of seduce students into it because they think they're just talking to another student. The other thing they do is they get so say you're hiring me to do your coursework for you. So say you're hiring me to do your coursework for you. You'll give me your login and your username and password for logging into the LMS, the learning management system, and so I will log in to do your work for you. Then I also have access to all the other students enrolled in that course, and so I can just start messaging them and recruiting more clients. I can also then, after I've cheated for you, send you an email and I've seen these emails that says pay me $20,000 or I'm going to report you to the university.
Speaker 1:Oh, so like Extortion, Hating, blackmail or extortion, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's very, very dangerous for students to engage with these companies and most students don't. Most students will do it on one paper and they'll just hire them to do the paper and they'll submit the paper themselves. But we do have and this is from my friends, my colleagues in Australia people in universities around the world who they call enrolled persons. They're there for a visa, they're there for financial aid fraud, they're there for all sorts of reasons, and so they have no there for all sorts of reasons, and so they have no intention of ever doing any work and so always contract cheaters are doing their entire courses for them. So that's a huge industry, so that's at the most extreme level.
Speaker 2:I love your story about your daughter because and what her professor is having her do. So, yes, in the real world we often collaborate with people and we don't give them credit on something Right. But if you think about what we're trying to do with students is we're trying to raise their metacognition. They're thinking about their thinking and how they got to point Z from point A, so teaching them to be fully aware and transparent about who helped them, who guided them and how those people, or, in today's age, how ChatGPT helps them and how it was useful or not useful, I think is just good cognitive development. It will make them more aware later when they are in a workplace and they're working with a team. And for them to say to their boss when they get a compliment for something they've done you know what thanks for that? Um, my friends, you know, my teammate sarah really helped me a lot with this and she did this, this and this, and I really think you should thank her as well. Um, and isn't that just a nicer society as well?
Speaker 1:so I think that's a great thing so you bring up generative AI and obviously it's just exploded. It's in everything from your bank to your seems like every new technology. This is the anything AI is to 2025, what anythingcom was to 2000,. What it was was petscom, papercom yeah, my company's worth $20 billion, and it really was. So some of that's going to get sorted out in the wash over time, but clearly AI is here to stay and will grow and it's for lack of a better term it's learning.
Speaker 2:And it's becoming agentic. Yeah, yeah, not right on its own.
Speaker 1:So I had this before I ask a question. I just want to kind of give this example from a recent experience I had at work. We were hiring for a position and the goal was to try to learn, to at least verify that the candidates had a basic kind of writing ability around a payroll position. Yeah, you are on payroll, huh. And so we assigned a writing assignment and they interviewed and then they took the computer and they did it right there and we said look, you can use AI if you want, just let us know that you've used it.
Speaker 1:Well, all the responses came in pretty similar. I'm sure everybody used AI, that's okay. But what we were really trying to get to which I don't think we got to through that was ability to analyze, ability to problem solve, ability to decide. You know when's the right time to send an email as opposed to picking up the phone to call. You know, once payroll is wrong, someone's tax deductions are wrong, someone didn't get the right deduction from their paycheck, so their kids aren't covered by health insurance, and now their son broke his leg and all. So that, like ai doesn't get to that piece, and so I feel just kind of uneasy about that yeah guys that we gave.
Speaker 1:So, in the context of this fast shifting world that we're in, how does your work address the role of of ai in society? Knowing that I mean, I'm just going to speak for myself I use it every day in my work. I use it every day and most of my colleagues do, and I'd imagine at UCSD people are using it every day and students use it. So how do we make sure that folks are responsible with it? But then also, we don't get away from, as you say, demonstrating the integrity of a degree that you've worked years to get. So when the regents sign off that so-and-so has a bachelor's from UCSD, it actually counts for something.
Speaker 2:It actually means something, not that I can just push a button, submit. This is the question of the ages right. So one thing we talk about is that we have to stop relying so much on product over process, and we've used things like, particularly, essays or the research paper written work, in particular, as an artifact that is, a valid measure of of student knowledge and abilities. Um, and I think that artifact has been defunct for decades because of contract cheating, because of plagiarism, because of whatever right. Um, and yet we were hesitant to move away from it for for many good reasons and some not so good reasons. And we just have to really rethink our learning objectives and the skills that we want students to develop. And how can we assess their process? What is? Is it really is? Well, first, how can we assess their process?
Speaker 2:Maybe I am going to talk to them about their process, so it's not just the written assignment, but then I sit down with them and I say, okay, talk me through this, talk me, what's the choice you made here? Why'd you make that choice? Tell me about this sentence. It's an amazingly crafted sentence. You know, again, this raises students' metacognition. They're thinking about their thinking, and so that that can only be a good thing. Or maybe we decide, you know what? I don't need to know whether my payroll person can write, because chat GPT payroll emails are kind of generic and kind of templated already, so maybe chat GPT can do that lifting. What I need to know is what you mentioned earlier Do they have the critical thinking skills to realize when an email is not as good as a phone call and that you wouldn't measure by writing, by getting them to write something right in a lab class through a lab report?
Speaker 2:Majority of our students are not going to become chemists, they're not going to be producing lab reports. Most of them probably won't even be reading scientific studies. Some will, some won't. And so really thinking about how can we assess that differently?
Speaker 2:Now, having said that, context matters. The situational factors of your classroom matters. If you have 400 students that you're trying to assess their lab knowledge, that's different than if you have 20 students. But we have engineering faculty here who had an NSF grant to study how they could scale up oral assessments, and so they would have students do an exam and then they'd have them in for a 15 or 20-minute oral assessment where they might focus on, like, one particular question that the student didn't quite get right and give them a chance to demonstrate they actually know, or they might just have them describe something that lacked a little bit of description, and so I think it is possible. We need to really think through how AI could maybe free up faculty and teaching assistant time from the stuff that doesn't directly impact students, so that they have more time to spend in human-to-human interactions with students to really be able to assess does the student have the knowledge and abilities? I think they should at this point.
Speaker 1:It's so interesting to think about the role of the oldest form of communication on earth, which is what you and I are doing here. I could use AI to fake that I understand organic chemistry and if you're a chemistry professor in two minutes you'll be able to tell in a conversation that I have no idea what I'm talking about. But there's a lot of logistics to that and at the university level, with classes of however big they are, that's really tricky.
Speaker 2:And yet if we don't do it and we haven't been doing it for decades, and by we I mean universities writ large, especially the larger universities then we are graduating folks who cannot talk to people about their knowledge because they've never had to. And, believe me, my husband works in the engineering field and it's torture when engineers can't talk to marketers or can't talk to the sales guys or can't talk to the president of the company. They need to be able to talk about engineering to non-engineering people, to other engineering people, and yet we have not done a very good job of that at the university level across the board good job of that at the university level across the board. And so that kind of gets also to the shift we have to make about really thinking about what we used to call soft skills, which always insulted me as a social scientist that we're now calling human skills or durable skills. I'm kind of calling them human, durable skills and we really have to start focusing on them.
Speaker 2:They were always kind of part of the hidden curriculum. Oh yeah, they're getting developed because we threw students in groups, so of course they're learning how to collaborate or you know whatever, and so we really need to, I think be an intentional focus on what do humans need to learn to do? That makes them an added value to the AI, because otherwise they're not going to get the job. Ai will get the job right.
Speaker 1:It's interesting. It's like that, reflecting on doctors and their bedside manner. Yeah, like you know, I had friends who went to medical school. You know I'm an old guy, so they went to medical school 30 years ago and there was no coursework in bedside manners.
Speaker 2:Or ethics probably.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've all had doctors who we feel are dismissive and we never go. Oh, you know, I looked them up and they wrote this paper or this, and they just ignore the fact that they make me feel like I'm not a human being and they didn't give me more than 30 seconds of their time going, wow, this doctor's great or this doctor's not great, not based on any objective measures of the science, but yeah, Human to human interaction.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the human stuff, and I love that you push away from that idea of the soft skill Right. And I love that you push away from that idea of the soft skill right. We used to be like, oh well, the engineers, like your husband would be the academic. You know the real tough, that's the real academic stuff. And then us social science people because I'm in your camp, soft touchy feeling, it's like, wait a second, you know, we need both.
Speaker 2:Those are hard skills to develop. They are hard skills and so let me tell you what worries me actually about our future and when we think about the disconnect that often occurs between K through 12 education and higher education. I see and correct me if I'm wrong. I'd love to hear from you that I'm wrong that a lot of the K-12 sector is diving full two feet deep into AI world, and partly because a lot of campuses are already kind of Google classrooms and then now Google's Gemini is out there and it's going to just be fully integrated and they're really talking about AI literacy. I mean, there's a whole nonprofit org up in the Bay Area that just helps K-12 folks develop AI literacy and I'm worried that we're going to get students in a few years at the university who are AI literate but actually haven't developed those human durable skills outside of the AI world. And I'd love to hear from you that I'm totally wrong about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you're spot on. Uh-oh I think we saw, we've seen, and there are a number of factors right, there's kind of a conscious approach and then there's most of it's an unconscious yeah. Following. You know some of the tools that promise to lighten your workload as a teacher, to evaluate essays really quickly, to catch on to other student information systems that we've already been using anyway. In the early days, Apple looked like they were going to corner the K-12 market.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:From a price point and some other blunders that didn't work Right Just absolutely Captured it Absolutely. So all the incoming the college kids who have grown up with a Chromebook- and yet, and yet they do not know how technology works.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:That's right it's become, it's an appendage that they don't Understand. You can live and know that your heart's important without understanding how a heart muscle works. Right, and it's like that. Yeah, we wrestle with it here at Albert Einstein Academies. We've put together a working group to explore AI and have been working, you know, regularly over the past year. But what happens is that the river is moving so quickly that you and so we can't even we're so far away from a policy or a position paper or or anything, because it's just rushing so quickly. Meanwhile, the commercial side of education K-12, which is a massive multi-billion dollar the Pearsons of the world, anytime, apple is interested in buying a student information system, which they did in the past, I think, for power school or whatever you're like. There's money there, right, when venture capitalists are buying, are buying some of these education related products, you know that it's going to be driven by bottom line and economies of scale and not necessarily pedagogy, good pedagogy.
Speaker 1:I think you're spot on. We face in the public school sector. We face, you know, the funding pressures. We face the, the, the state accountability measures, you know, on an endless cycle of accountability where you can look online and see our dashboards and see where we are, and all these, all these student subgroups. I mean you guys have the. You know other metrics, right?
Speaker 1:I'm not sure US Student World Report is still something people look at, but I know for a long time that was the deal, the ranking, and so my trepidation around this has been, as you mentioned, like, are we going to have students ready at the college level who, if a professor, were to say, okay, everybody, I'm going to come around and verify that your laptop is offline and I need you to write to this prompt and then discuss it in the classroom? You know, no one ever writes perfectly on a first draft, right? I mean, talk to Ernest Hemingway, yeah, but at least getting your thoughts down and then let's talk about it and defend your thoughts. I don't know if kids are going to be able to do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we don't yet know if that's going to be bad for cognition.
Speaker 1:Right, right, right, we don't know.
Speaker 2:I do know that spelling the automatic corrections to spelling has made me a worse speller. I routinely misspell words now that I never used to misspell before, like your and your Right. And so we do know that technology and I know with GPS on my phone I've gotten a bit dumber in terms of navigation than I used to be. I used to be much better at north, south, east, west and all that kind of stuff so we do know that technology can either hinder or amplify learning and cognition, especially with it generating, you know, no blank page syndrome anymore. Sounds lovely, but what do we lose in that process? And we just won't know for decades. And so I don't know. I guess I would say that I'm glad I could retire in eight years, and maybe it'll take longer than that to really hit the university system, but I don't know.
Speaker 1:To me it feels a little bit like the difference between when you and I took photos as kids, where it was like, at least in my case, we didn't have a lot of money, so it was like you buy a roll and you're like, oh my God, load it the right way in the camera because you're going to overexpose it and it's $7.
Speaker 2:And then take your photos and then you and be very choosy about what photos you took.
Speaker 1:That's right, you're not just hanging out thousands of photos and then you take it and you drop it off and two weeks later and you're like, oh my God, my thumb was in front of this, as opposed to now. I have 6,000 photos in my on my phone, google, and this and then that, and they're a lot, but but very few of them are meaningful to me. Yeah, and so I think, like I can remember papers I wrote in college.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:A topic that I dove deeply into and I wrestled with this thing and now you can train AI to mimic your writing style. That's what I've been playing around with, where I've uploaded a bunch of written work and position papers and some creative stuff that I've done into AI and then had it generate other essays on topics that I give it but yeah, previous writing. And then you go where's that line between like original work or using a tool? I mean, I don't drive a horse and buggy anymore.
Speaker 2:Well, but also, yeah, but also. This raises a different economy or problem we have to think of. There's a difference between you doing that and a novice writer doing that. True, and so you and I have been through the process of developing our own authorial voice. We have been through the process of struggling with the blank page. We've been through that process of knowing that I can't just sit down and write, like I have to think about things and I have to write and then rewrite, and then rewrite and write, but our novice students have not. Novice students have not. And so what?
Speaker 2:We, every discipline now, whether it's writing or math or chemistry or whatever, has to figure out what are the foundational skills that science is still telling us that will probably matter in terms of cognition. And then we have to figure out how we can scaffold that in. My concern is that we can't just do that at the university level. I know we've talked we society, and at least in the US and Canada, has talked for years about we need more symmetry between K through 16. Like there shouldn't be this K through 12 figures, everything out. And then we figure everything out because we influence each other right.
Speaker 2:And so if the professor of writing here, decides how to scaffold in and start where she thinks it should start, which is struggling with the blank page. So she's having students in class struggling with the blank page, but all through K, through K, through 12, they didn't have to do that. She's actually, you know, starting way further back, and so I just don't know how that's going to work. I hate to be so cynical or skeptical or pessimist, but I think it's something that we, as educators and people who really care about learning and the certifications of learning, we really have to think through as a community, and this can't just be on the individual shoulders of individual teachers, individual instructors.
Speaker 1:What are you hopeful about in this space?
Speaker 2:I'm hopeful that. I mean there is a lot more conversation about integrity now than there was prior to AI. I mean we talked about it a little bit during the pandemic, but we didn't really change anything, and so I do. Really. I am really hopeful that I see people making changes. I see people really saying, oh shoot, this does have an impact. I've got to change the way I'm doing things. So I'm really hopeful about that.
Speaker 2:I'm really hopeful about our students, actually, because you are seeing a lot of students think carefully about this and think I don't want to offload my brain to this machine. There's some really, really critically thinking students out there that are resisting the AI hype. They're resisting saying that they have to have that A1 sauce with their steak, when they don't want their A1 sauce, if you get the reference there. So I'm hopeful about that. I'm hopeful that there are some intentional, thoughtful efforts to use ai and not um what we've seen in other situations where they just openly give one of the major companies millions of dollars to just infiltrate their entire education system. That doesn't make me hopeful. But intentional choices like k through 12, a lot of uh that people have been using like magic school, like an intentional ai that's been designed for educational purposes, not these general l, l, m, m um machines that have not been intentionally designed.
Speaker 1:So I'm hopeful about those things um yeah, it's interesting, I never anticipated the environmental. Yeah, that's right, my daughter is very hesitant to use ai at all, but from her angle it's more around. Dad, do you know what it's doing in the environment? I'm like I, you know, I bought the 19 a month chat gbt thing and I thought it was cool and I'm asking it all kinds of weird stuff and all. And she said, dad, have you seen the impact? And so I started to kind of dive into it a little bit. And unbeknownst to me, you know, these tech companies are buying server farms that are 300 000 square feet in one warehouse just to serve to house these servers, so that this thing can run in states that don't have water, in very dry states, and these, these server farms need a lot of water for cooling stay cool, so yeah, so that was something that came out of nowhere, at least on my very yeah, I do now when I present on this topic.
Speaker 2:One, I disclose what images if I've used the tool for anything particular images and then I disclose how much energy that used.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:Just to help bring that awareness.
Speaker 1:You have to ask AI to tell you how much energy that used to help bring that awareness. You have to ask AI to tell you how much energy.
Speaker 2:No, I look at the research.
Speaker 1:Well, you've been so generous with your time and I appreciate very much your expertise and knowledge and that you've brought some some a 3d element to, to something that you know, as, as we started out talking about, people understand the word academic and they understand the word integrity. Put them together and what it really means in real life. Not so much Um. Is there anything that we've not touched on that may be rattling around in your head for you, uh, that you'd like to mention? And then I have one more question for you after that head for you that you'd like to mention.
Speaker 2:And then I have one more question for you after that. I'd just like to put an exclamation point on what you said earlier about how your school system's still struggling with having a policy. I'm glad you're doing it thoughtfully, I'm glad you're doing it intentionally, and I think here's where chat, gpt or Gen AI tools might be helpful to you to just say let's just get something done. It's not going to be perfect. These are living, breathing documents. We're going to have to change it, maybe in the fall or maybe before then, because this stuff moves so quickly.
Speaker 2:But just some common sense, standards and guidance for folks. So common things about like, what's an honest use of these tools? You know what's, what's, what protects the values, what are our values, and then what, how can we use or not use these tools? Provide some guidance around that in alliance with those values, and I would focus on integrity, I would focus on learning and I would focus on your job of assessing, you know, certifying student learning, and then so what does that mean? So I think, I think being OK with something that has to be a living, breathing document.
Speaker 1:Thank you for that, because we can get stuck in the and the endless debate, and so sometimes you have to generate a product. My last question is a hypothetical.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Imagine you have the opportunity to create a billboard on the side of the freeway. I've had people say I wouldn't do it. I believe that pollutes the view. Let's ignore that for now we're going to ignore that one. You have the chance to create this billboard. People are seeing it, driving by at 70 miles an hour. What does your billboard say to the world about what you believe in, about your work, about, uh, your views on life in general?
Speaker 2:I am. I'm not the best at putting uh big things like big ideas into like a pithy marketing slogan, but it would be something like what you do matters or something like that, like your choices matter and how I would expand on that is just again, people thinking about getting out of their own heads and always thinking about themselves and thinking about the other people around them. So using your signal light matters to other people, right? What you say to your child about using AI matters. What you say to them about the importance of grades matters. Your actions have reactions. They impact people. You can't control how people are going to react to you, but you can control. You can think carefully about your choices and always say you know, if I was around me right now, how would that impact me and then maybe make different choices.
Speaker 1:Thank you for that and that's a great. It connects back to your work, right, just in all senses of understanding how to live a life of integrity. So I thank you so much. I will attach links to your books in the show notes and thank you for really again making what could be an abstract topic and an unusual topic right. I mean, maybe more and more universities have work like yours Not enough, not enough, right and I think society doesn't have them. No, I'm not going to ask the question as to whether the White House should have one. We'll leave that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, We'll leave that conversation. We'll just say hashtag, make it someone's job.
Speaker 1:There we go Make it someone's job. Yeah, thank you so much for your time today and really for sharing and chatting with me. I really appreciate it Sure.
Speaker 2:Thank you for asking.
Speaker 1:So we'll cut it there and then I'll let you know, I'll send you an email when it's going to go live and I don't think we touched on anything controversial that you don't want in there. Yeah, and I'll. Usually what happens is I just edit for some dead space, some dead air. Sometimes I or my coughing that I had.
Speaker 2:I'll take that out, but other than that, your content in here and I don't think I don't think I'll lose my American passport for talking about a one sauce, but we'll find out.
Speaker 1:I wasn't. Yeah, I know I was going to my my board member, the Canadian board member. I always I joke around with her. She gave me a hard time the other day about a budget thing and I said it's OK, I'm going to get my revenge. Aren't you going to be the 51st state? Yeah, you just looked at me.
Speaker 2:She gave me this death glare and I go okay, sorry, I love what Trump since we're off the record now I love what Trump is doing for Canadian sovereignty and Canadian unification. I think it's a beautiful sight to behold.
Speaker 1:Well, I was saying the other day I said I've never run into a pissed off Canadian before, like you don't want to run into us. I even saw Trudeau say something like we're slow to anger, but when we get mad we whatever, and I was like I just never. It just doesn't seem to be like a like part of the national. Well, when it happens, I'm sure you have more, obviously you know, but it's actually better now.
Speaker 2:It's actually better when our anger is extrovert, like it is right now. Normally we're passive, aggressive, and so we're a little bit, yeah, not so nice with our anger, but at least we're clear and direct, and you know exactly.
Speaker 1:This is just. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Well, not that I'm trying to create more work for myself. Honestly, I'm so intrigued by the K-12 system and how you're all dealing with this. If you ever want to think about including me in your conversations there around AI and AI or just AI, don't hesitate to reach out. Like I said, I'm, I'm, I can't believe I'm saying trying to give myself more work, but, um, you know, you're in my community and, uh, your students might come to my university at some point and they do, yeah, and so.
Speaker 1:So I very much appreciate that. I'll keep that on the on. Uh, you know on my list of people to reach out to where we are. I think we're going to have one more meeting of that task force this school year. But, going forward, it's a topic. I mentioned previously that our schools are IB schools, international Baccalaureate, which is great. Yeah, the IB came out really super early with a statement about AI. They were like, hey, it's here, it's a tool, ai. They were like, hey, it's here, it's a tool. If you guys use it in your community, kids need to cite it the same way they cite something. And I felt like, okay, at least typically the IB is slow on stuff because it's global, so to synthesize views around the world as well. But in this one I was like, okay, they said something, but then I started to think about it. I'm like it's not the same as citing a Google search.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:This is a thing that is learning from what's out there, and I've been using ChatGBT since it started and I'm like you can't compare version 1.0 with what's today Right, 50 times more powerful. So a lot of good thinking still to come, and but I really appreciate, uh, your time and and I wish you all the best in the rest of this academic year. Thanks you, too.
Speaker 1:Have a great day okay, bye thanks for joining us on the hangout podcast. You can send us an email at podcastinfo at protonme. Many thanks to my daughter, maya, for editing this episode. I'd also like to underline that this podcast is entirely separate from my day job and, as such, all opinions expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thanks for coming on in and hanging out.
