The school year fast approaches. Soon students, including yours truly, will return to the classroom ready for another round of auditorium classes, long nights studying, and copious amounts of writing (unless you’re a business major, of course). Unlike previous years, however, this school year will be the first full year to happen after the advent of artificial intelligence. 

Though schools have always had to deal with plagiarism, chatbots such as ChatGPT threaten to revolutionize the ways in which students can cheat without being caught. This revolution comes at an already perilous time for academic discipline. Self-reported plagiarism among students has been steadily climbing for the last two decades. In the aftermath of Covid, student attendance rates have dropped at all levels of education. Many students simply don’t care anymore and are willing to use whatever avenues are open to them to skirt by. A program that will write somewhat convincing essays is bound to aggravate the problem. 

Whether American universities adjust adequately to this new problem remains to be seen. Some solutions are simpler than others. As George Leef wrote in January, a return to oral and handwritten exams would make both the classes and the students themselves better at forming their arguments and thinking deeply about the problems presented to them. It would also require students to actually attend class if they want to pass. Alternatively, universities may invest in technology designed to detect whether an essay was written by a human or not. Similar programs such as Turnitin already exist to detect manual plagiarism, but whether such programs will be effective remains to be determined. 

Ultimately, the solution to chronic plagiarism or absenteeism will have to be stricter discipline standards at the university level. If academic culture has decayed so far as to encourage students to flout their teachers’ suggestions, those teachers will have to resort to harsher measures. And universities at an institutional level will have to remind themselves and their students that their purpose is the pursuit of learning and knowledge, goals that cannot be accomplished with a chatbot or from the inside of a dorm bedroom.