Teachers Fighting Excuses & AI Cheating
Instructors are struggling with a rising tide of student excuses, requests for leniency, and the challenges of detecting and addressing AI use. This creates a stressful environment where educators feel pressured to balance learning rigor with student evaluations and face persistent attempts to circumvent established rules. The core issue is a disconnect between expectations and student behavior.
SOURCES (60)
“So, I have deduced from google searches he must still be a student or has not taken his boards yet(he doesn’t show up on the national registry). I did message UAB screenshots of his comment saying anyone that thinks like this shouldn’t be in healthcare,…”
“Since your admin won't give you the kudos you deserve for actually doing something about the problem, I will. Good job! And good luck with next year's cohort, too!”
“CS grad student, US. Had one of those moments this term. I was walking a student through a concept I'd consider basic in my subfield, and they asked a one line follow up, not a gotcha, just a genuine "wait, why does that part actually work though?", and I froze. I could cite the result, apply it, I'd taught it before. But asked to rebuild the why from scratch in plain language, I hit a wall. Made me wonder how much of what I know is fluent recognition v/s something I could actu”
“Hi guys, Yes I fucked up, I know. I got caught cheating on an exam during a summer course (orgo). However, they let me off with a warning. I did need to fail the course, but there’s no indication on my transcript or even conduct records it was because of a AI violation. Doesn’t help my situation, I know, but many other students got caught as well. So it’s not on conduct records, disciplinary records, or any academic records. I asked them if medical schools could ever find out, and they explicitl”
“Honestly, this seems above your level of expertise. However, I have come to appreciate Linguistic phonics (speech to print). We use a lot of white boards to teach the code from the sound side. So instead of showing cat and having him blend. You say, “say cat. What sounds do you hear?” You may have to assist here for a bit but make him do the work by repeating. Then have him write the c while saying /c/ (the sound) and the same for a and t. Then do more words. Working from sounds teaches how the”
“If you switch on the 'Supporting Evidence' on that site, it seems to be basing it's opinion on three things:- Use a descriptive triad of "reviewing, directing, and course" (it incorrectly misunderstood 'course correcting'). That's not common in writing but humans do do it occasionally.- Using the word 'thoughtful'. I don't understand that as evidence of AI.- Using the words 'Book Apart' together, which would be a clear AI signal if it wasn't the name of a publisher of short books, and being used”
“I have a student who I am almost certain cheated on an exam. He gets extra time, so he takes the exam at the disability center. The office confiscates their phone and smart device, but the students are placed in a room and not continuously monitored (despite me asking them to do so). I feel like it’s not hard for a student to have a second device to cheat from. In fact, this exact situation has happened before. The reason I suspect this student of cheating is because the quality of his work abso”
“Today’s last day of summer session and the emails have begun! They all follow pretty much the same format! My replies after the quotes. “Hello Professor, I hope this email finds you well…” You do or ChatGPT does? “I’m writing because I’m concerned about my grade…” You should be! “I’ve missed a lot of assignments and classes. I know attendance is required and you don’t accept late assignments..” Yes, you are correct. “…but I’m wondering if there’s anyway I might be able to submit the missing work”
“Check out this post from LinkedIn, at least one of the students emailing you is peddling a guide for others to do the same! (AI detected below): Cold emailing 100 professors for research taught me something very interesting. Not about research. About people. Here is what I learned: Reply rates have nothing to do with how impressive your resume looks. They have everything to do with whether the professor can tell, in ten seconds, that you understand what their lab actually does. Timing matters mo”
“If you go hang out at r/Professors , you will see that this is not at all unusual. Some professors find that a certain percentage of their students will fail their class each term, and often for the same reason. I agree with you, it's a bizarre situation. You might want to consider giving a syllabus quiz as your first assignment. I would also suggest holding office hours if you don't already do so.”
“The HS student, I’ll go out of my way to make sure they are squared away/engage the parent You might be doing them a bit of a disservice here. I teach HS and do not to this, with intention. I'd rather they learn the lesson now than at uni when units cost 2k+ a pop.”
“The sad part is these kids don't even realize they're steadily turning their brains into mush and actively destroying comprehension and deduction skills.”
“people saying oh as long as you are 'reviewing' it you're fine are just coping. spending too much of our time 'reading' gen outputs *will* atrophy our skills over time, unless we work against that alluringly smooth path of no resistance.”
“title basically i find it weird how this thing works like, if person A got a few Bs and Cs just because they were lazy, and wrote in the addnl info section that they had severe depression and person B got roughly the same Bs and Cs but because they actually had some medical condition like depression, then how would AOs know the difference between the two? this seems kind of unfair because something like depression / anxiety can be something which doesn't need to be diagnosed medically, so th”
“Genuine question, what use are they in school other than the paycheck for their attendance when they don’t try? I’ve got family members like this who are not developmentally disabled, they’ve been well tested and given appropriate supports but despite their last 6 years being post-COVID, they just have no interest in even learning enough to have a basic understanding of how to exist as an adult. Opportunities abound, multiple family members are supportive and in special education (but without be”
“I just got my fourth accommodation request for a student in one of my classes in the Spring 2026 semester. I went through the usual procedure (access the request from a secure computer, apply password, read through pdf of hand-written document). Hitherto, the accommodation requests have either been irrelevant to my classes or a blanket accommodation I do as a matter of course for all students. This last was completely impossible, however. Why? The course ended last week. submitted by”
“A student in a F2F class in the coming fall semester contacted me to ask two questions: They wanted to know if attendance is mandatory and if, instead, they could "just get the materials online." They wanted to know if they could bring two "very well behaved" children to every class, because the student provides childcare for these children. I teach at a college where faculty are required to report attendance, so I told them that they have to come to class. Also, I told them”
Some schools are going all the way back to books, pencils and paper.
“Anyone else noticing an uptick in students begging not to fail because they will get deported? If so, does it change your grading policies at all? I know the current state of the US. I do. It's bad. I get it. But, if a student doesn't turn in any work, I mean, there's only so much I can do, even considering my hatred of current immigration/VISA/etc. policies. I am not saying it causes me to pass a student who deserves to fail, but I just want to teach my class, dude. I don't get”
“I’d stop with texting them back immediately. If you get another question about it respond with an email if you respond at all. If they’re not comfortable asking you in an email then it sounds like they know they’re asking you something they shouldn’t be asking”
“The student used some fancy numbers, etc in their email. My department chair knows the situation and told me to submit their grades "as normal". This student has been causing so much stress for me; I feel deprived of my human rights. I am not looking for any legal advice, but wondering if anyone has resolved such a situation besides getting a different job. ----- Thanks, everyone! I didn't share many details in this post, but I've been getting emails from different offices acro”
“yep, this is pretty normal, schools and unis treat early meetings as exploratory or a procurement checkbox so people often show up unprepared. they route stuff through admins and committees, budgets are seasonal, and folks get jumpy about vendors so they deflect with "send a proposal." before you book, ask for a three bullet agenda, who owns the budget or can say yes, and send a one page summary to read ahead, then open the call by confirming the desired outcome and next step. doing th”
“Clever. I’d been getting so aggravated reading this thread until I got to your post. Remember when our justice system [supposedly] operated on the principle that letting several guilty people go free was better than sending one person wrongly to prison?”
“I saw a post asking people how long it was taking them to write each secondary and most people were saying a couple hours to two days. It’s literally been taking me over a week to write each one. I already knew I suck at writing and it would take me longer than everyone else but I didn’t think it would be this bad😭 It’s already been over 2 weeks since I’ve received most of them and I’ve only submitted 2 so far. Does anyone have any tips on speeding up the process?? I’m really struggling.”
“If you look on a standard students path, 4 years of college they're supposed to obtain 15 work/activities, 3 that are most meaningful, probably 1-2 significant and developed hobbies, good grades, good MCAT, research, shadowing, clinical. It's a very packed list of requirements for a time mostly spent on academics already. Now, schools are increasingly asking for things that aren't already explained in the primary application. Is this a new form of application creep? submitted b”
“In my online writing classes, students can't progress beyond the rough drafts of their assignments without feedback and a grade. While the points aren't too low, these are low-stakes assignments in that students earn full credit for doing assignments in earnest. In these short summer terms, I turn these around within 24 hours, too. Student used AI on the working draft and got caught. They raged at me repeatedly in messages today after not checking comments in which I told them that their”
“That's it. That's the post. Solidarity, my fellow summer asynch faculty. If they want me to teach this next summer, I'm asking for a raise in the form of a bottle of wine per week. submitted by /u/littleirishpixie [link] [comments]”
“Would being first generation college be a valid topic for this prompt? submitted by /u/Significant-Role798 [link] [comments]”
“Two students send an email each on a Friday (after 5pm) asking me to do various things so they can drop the course. They followed up Sunday night and Monday morning reminding me of the urgency of their requests. It has been 0 business minutes since their original email. The university cannot process their requests over the weekend. submitted by /u/Brief-Evidence-9511 [link] [comments]”
“Your use of the term catastrophic here which is a bit of editorializing that not everyone would agree with. We have the tools for universal literacy, we see it in China and Korea and Cuba, and so it is more a matter of applying these principals to the US than acting like all this tech, which I don’t like either, is the reason for poor literacy.”
“This is insane and they should receive pushback. There’s many errors in the podcast and they clearly just fed an admissions PDF to some AI tool. submitted by /u/aptitudes [link] [comments]”
“Students have become alarmingly and increasingly chronic liars in the years since covid. I don't know what it is.”
“I use this method too! But I call it a snowball fight, and we just ball up the paper 🤣 I don’t have the patience to wait for 32 7th graders to fold their airplanes…. and I do a lab the first day of school and catch food on fire to calculate caloric energy…. but paper airplanes is where I draw the line 🤣 🫶”
“I’ve been in meetings where I’ve provided meaningful recommendations that were implemented and (imo) effective. But more than half of my IEP meetings are for kids I’ve never met. I’m just there to fill the legal requirement of having a gened teacher in the room. And I’ve been in meetings where giving honest recommendations would not work so I don’t bother. Sending “This kid has no diagnosed conditions and is just an asshole raised by screens and feral cats. Removing failure and consequences via”
“I go to a school with grade deflation (the average grade in most AP classes is around a B-). How much will a 5 on the AP test offset a B+ in the class. submitted by /u/Rookium [link] [comments]”
“Shut up and do it like the rest of us did. I’m fucking sick and tired of this sub degenerating into nothing but high-achoolers and new undergraduates complaining. Fuck off with this shit.”
“The guy above is a prick. You took the best decision with the info you had. You’re a smart man. Sadly life involve good decisions but also involve luck”
“Am I the only one who feels like every secondary they write is absolute garbage? These questions are throwing me for a loop, and I feel so down. submitted by /u/Traditional_Check529 [link] [comments]”
“Teaching my first online async class this upcoming fall and I’m not too happy about it. It’s a lifecycle nutrition course. I would have loved to implement some counseling skills (how to talk to each age group), and plenty of group discussion. I don’t want to rely too much on essays and discussion boards because of all the ai bs. Do you think doing video submissions is crazy??? What are your online async must have tips? Also how the heck do you grade participation? submitted by /u/cen”
“I think they were joking. It started with a kid getting like three points off on a test and he thought that I graded it so it just became a running joke”
They want you using only their approved poorly created materials 🤣
“Someone in CB security has said if the student didn’t cheat, they should appeal. It’s possible their device was running a background up managed by district IT that the student wasn’t aware of and Bluebook detected the background app. If this is the case, it can be cleared up, but has to go through the appeal process.”
“One of my students' email : "I was out of town last week and dropped my phone in the lake while my family was on a boat. Because of this,, I was unable to sign in to Blackboard on any device because the two-factor authentication code had to be sent to my phone number." Also, would it be ethically ok to ask for call logs? or new phone receipt? submitted by /u/Fgrant_Gance_12 [link] [comments]”
“I wonder if these accusations are driven by AI-sourced analysis or something. And we all know the still-falliible nature of that...”
“This happens often enough that students have accused me of it and admins reflexively believed it when it wasn’t true. In rare instances where I’ve failed to provide info to students I’m the first to figure that out and I don’t penalize them in grading. My admins refused to see the truth and labeled me difficult.”
“Resumes? research/conference papers? I'm confused. Thank you :) It feels redundant to attach the above bc it's already in the primary app, no? submitted by /u/Top-Vermicelli1384 [link] [comments]”
“Ok thank you. I’m going to reach out to the teachers, but wanted to get some opinions from here as well.”
“I had my mid-year a few weeks ago and it was obviously AI-written with a prompt that had no information on anything. There are no metrics, specifics, or anything like that. The person that "wrote" it doesn't interact with me at all and wouldn't know anything about my contribution to the company. So now I've been told I'll be put on a PIP and have 2 months to fix my performance. But the PIP was also AI-written and also has nothing to do with the work the team does. I can”