Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:

Today on episode number 568 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, teaching for integrity in the age of AI with Tricia Bertram Gallant and David Rettinger. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:25]:

Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. I’ve been looking forward to today’s conversation about a newish book, The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI. I got to read the book. I also got to participate in a Perusall book club on it, and I have been so looking forward to this conversation with these two coauthors. Tricia Bertram Gallant is an internationally recognized expert in academic integrity and ethics in higher education. As the director of the Center for Integrity in Education at the University of California, San Diego, she leads innovative efforts to cultivate integrity centered learning environments and assessment practices.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:38]:

With a career spanning nearly two decades, doctor Bertram Gallant has advised universities, policy makers, and global organizations on fostering cultures of honesty and accountability in the face of emerging challenges. Most recently, the integration of generative AI in education. A prolific author, Trisha’s books, including The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI, have shaped institutional approaches to academic integrity worldwide. Her scholarship blends research with practical strategies, making her a sought after speaker, consultant, and media commentator on issues of cheating, AI, ethics, and assessment security. Beyond academia, Tricia’s work has influenced national and international policies on academic integrity, including the collaborations with the Council of Europe, UNESCO, and the International Center for Academic Integrity. She has delivered keynote addresses and workshops across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, engaging faculty, administrators, and students in reimagining integrity for the twenty first century.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:03:19]:

Dr. David Rettinger has taught psychology at the college level for over twenty years, including at the University of Mary Washington and now at the University of Tulsa. He’s an expert in students’ academic integrity behavior, having published research in theory into practice, research in higher education, ethics and behavior, and psychological perspectives on academic cheating. He is co editor of Cheating Academic Integrity, forty years of research published by Wiley. His research has demonstrated the importance of students’ attitudes towards school and beliefs about peer behavior in determining whether students will cheat. Tricia Bertrand Gallant and David Rettinger, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:03:45]:

Thanks for having us.

David Rettinger [00:03:45]:

Thank you.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:03:46]:

I’ve been so looking forward to having this conversation today. And I wanna start with just this idea. You both root so much in your work that cheating is just a normal part of being human. And I almost am afraid to ask this because it can seem so trite, but I know that that’s not the case for either one of you. When you think about this idea that it’s a natural, normal part of being human, what comes to mind for you, David?

David Rettinger [00:04:19]:

Sure, Bonni. It’s a great place to start. It really is true that people do cheat, And this and that’s the reason we have rules in the first place in our lives is because we need to set boundaries because people don’t always know where they are. It’s not always obvious from a situation. But if you think about it, right, we have think about if you’re listening in the audience, have did you speed on your way to work today? Have you ever made the left on red where you really probably shouldn’t have? Did you do you always give back the extra change that you get? I think the simple answer is most of us do the right thing most of the time. There’s a lot of good research that supports that notion. However, there’s a we all have a price. The story I’ll tell, the brief version of the story, is the time that my daughter cut her hand open with a a carving knife when she was about eight learning to cook.

David Rettinger [00:05:11]:

If you’d asked me that morning, are you a good driver, Dave? I would have said, yes. I’m a good safe driver. But I guarantee you that nobody who saw me driving that day would have called me a good or safe or legal driver. There’s always gonna be social, personal, individual pressures on us at any given moment that are gonna cause us to do things that either we didn’t realize were wrong or that we perfectly well know that are wrong, but that in that moment seem like a reasonable trade off to our behavior. So if I’m gonna do that, if I’m going to cut a corner here or there, I also have my boundaries, things that I would never do. I would never falsify my research data. I love my research too much. I care too much about being right.

David Rettinger [00:05:53]:

I would never do that. And so would I ever cheat in school? Well, nowadays, I would say no. And that’s because it’s really meaningful to me. It there’s a line there. But for students, they may not interpret school. Their their meaning of school is different for them than it is for us, and it may be different from what it was for us way back when. So at the end of all of this is to say, of course, we cheat because we don’t all take the same perspective on the behaviors that we’re engaging in, and our trade offs are different from moment to moment and person to person.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:06:26]:

Wow. David, I don’t know how you did that so succinctly. It can so much seem like if everybody’s gonna cheat, then it doesn’t matter. But that’s, of course, not what you said and, of course, not what either one of you believes. You both hold these values so dearly while simultaneously recognizing that part of being human. That looks like it a little bit more at us as individuals. But, Trisha, I’d love to have you share about how cheating could also be looked at as part of some deeper, more systemic issues.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:07:04]:

Well, jeez, where to start with that? So I I referenced back to a book I read, I think, when I was still in my PhD program. It was Stressed Out Students by Denise Clark Pope, and, she now is at Stanford running the SOS program. And she talks about students doing school. And I think that just sums up this a lot of the structural systemic issues. So simply, students do school because we’ve set it up for them that way. We really emphasize, I think by we, I mean society, I mean parents, I mean even school systems and educators. We really emphasize grades, getting that GPA, getting those courses, getting those degrees, or or else you won’t be happy in life. Right? You, you know, call you must have a college degree in order to be happy in life.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:07:55]:

And so then, of course, students are going to focus on those extrinsic goals. Right? And we don’t talk enough to them about how those extrinsic goals are important and have value because they’re meant to symbolize learning, growth, knowledge, skills, all sorts of these wonderful things, but but we diminish those those messages. Right? And so that is one big structural factor. I think another one at the higher ed level, not really at the K through 12 level, is the scaling, the industrialization of higher education. We’ve gone from 25 kids in a classroom to 500. There was a good reason for that. We were trying to make higher education accessible to the masses and not just for the elite and the privileged. Good intention.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:08:41]:

Unfortunately, though, with scaling up, it’s really hard for students and faculty to develop relationships with each other, to find comfort in approaching each other, to asking questions of a faculty member when you’re one of 500 students in a class and you feel more like an an a number than a than a face and a human. And so that’s a big one as well. And it’s it’s not unrelated to that credentialing, that doing school thing. And so it all feeds into this automated process that existed before GenAI. I used to say before Gen AI, I said this years ago, if we treat a students like assignment factories, they’re gonna act like assignment factories. So if it’s just one prompt after another that they have to do to submit to get a grade and maybe there’s no feedback on it, maybe there isn’t, but none of those assignments are tied together and there doesn’t seem to be any meaning or connection between what they’re doing in those assignments and what they’re supposed to be learning, they automate the process. And so Gen AI came along and said, hey. I can help you automate that process.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:09:40]:

You don’t even have to do anything anymore.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:09:43]:

I have been podcasting for over ten years, and I know that I’ve told at least some version of the story I’m about to share a single time. And I remember hearing from multiple people who I did not know over email say, oh my goodness gracious. That was such an incredibly brave story that you told. How could you even tell that story? So I kinda I’ve I’ve kind of been reluctant to tell it again, but because it just has come up for me so much. And I should share with listeners, by the way, that not only have I, of course, read Tricia and David’s book, but I also participated in a perusal book club. So I just feel very seeped in this work right now, and so, of course, our stories come back to us. So I consider myself to be a very ethical person and an intentionally ethical person, and some of the most treasured affirmations that people have made about me and also my husband, Dave, us as a family, is how intentional we are to be ethical. But I think you get the general idea that I am trying to say that I’ve grown a lot since this example I’m about to share.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:10:48]:

When I was in college, I cheated. I don’t like that. It makes me embarrassed to say it again. I’ll probably wait another ten years before I decide to disclose that because it doesn’t match with who I am as a person, who I have become, the sense of integrity that I have today. But at the time, it’s it brings up so many threads that you both have already started to introduce. So it was a Spanish class. I really struggled with it, and I got to the point of thinking that after the teacher made fun of me for not conjugating the verb I want to correctly, I accidentally said, I am in love with the teacher. And she repeated back to me what I had said.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:11:32]:

I didn’t even know what was wrong with it until she said it in English. And the it felt like the whole not only the class, but that the whole building was laughing at me as a young 18 year old who had never taken a foreign language before. And so, yes, I in the final exam, she was not present in the room. She wasn’t present in the room in during any of our exams. I did have sitting next to me verbs. Guess what? The same thing I had messed up and had felt particularly humiliated by. Not only was I embarrassed, but I also then had a fixed mindset. I can’t do this.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:12:08]:

I can’t learn Spanish. I am not good at this. So I had all of these, and I sound so much like I’m making an excuse. So I promise my story is almost over. But but then sitting there, yeah, the verbs, they were next to me, and I actually didn’t even probably need them. Looking back, I knew enough verbs, but if you know anything about learning foreign languages, you gotta know the verbs and then you gotta conjugate them in different ways. And I felt like I needed that, probably didn’t. And so, yes, I cheated.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:12:34]:

And so I’m I’m, I promise this will be the longest story that I tell, but, you can tell that just so much of your work, your research, and your experience is informed by that one anecdote from my life. I’m gonna pause and ask you to share anything that you want to sort of identify of what I have shared, and and then we can kind of shift into some of the other questions I have to ask you.

David Rettinger [00:13:01]:

I hate to call that a good story.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:13:04]:

It’s a great story. But story.

David Rettinger [00:13:06]:

Well, the story is great. Right?

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:13:07]:

Yeah.

David Rettinger [00:13:08]:

But it’s obviously the emotion behind it is less. It’s such an amazing it hits that case study could just be the entire table of contents of the book. Mhmm. Because how you how you felt is so important to the story. The things that the teacher did in the moment were so important to the story. To the structure of the way the exam was constructed is an important part of this story, to the whole notion of what’s important in terms of what you learn, the learning structures, the goals is important to that story. So there is not a single element of that story that doesn’t turn out to be relevant to what we’re talking about.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:13:49]:

Mhmm.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:13:50]:

Yeah. And I would just say specifically, what struck me about your story is one, I have similar stories of feeling either angry or embarrassed in class based on what an instructor has said to me in response to something I’ve said. But what you said was I had a fixed mindset. I lost my ability to think that I could do it. And that low self efficacy, right, that I can’t do it or I can’t do it to the level I wanna do it is so ever present in a lot of our institutions. And I would think the more elite the institution, the more competitive it was to get into that institution, the more feelings of fraud that students are gonna have. And that moment they hit that first a minus, let alone getting embarrassed by a professor in front of the entire class, which which are extremes. Right? One’s private, but but still, our students get an a minus and they think that the the world is over.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:14:45]:

And so that low self efficacy, I can’t do it unless I cheat, is so powerful, such a powerful motivator.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:14:53]:

Trisha, you mentioned this book having an impact on you, the stressed out students book. And there’s been a book that I I must have read it decades and decades ago called The Four Agreements. And one of the agreements is never take anything personally. And he the author Don Miguel Ruiz goes on to say, even if somebody does mean something personal, that is very rare compared to the times we take things personally, and that was not the person’s intent at all. But even in the cases where it actually was intended to be vengeful in some way and a personal attack, the freedom that comes in our every ounce of our being when we make that decision to not carry that weight. And that was another thread that has just been going through so much of your work. Talk about the ways in which I can be helped as a faculty member if I don’t take academic integrity violations personally?

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:15:56]:

Yeah. The violations are hard not to take personally because they involve intellectual, physical, and emotional labor. If you do what we suggest and you respond and you respond according to your institutional policy, you might have to write up a report, you might have to submit it somewhere, you might have to go to a quote unquote hearing. And that all takes time, it takes physical work, and it’s emotionally exhausting for a lot of faculty primarily because they see it as outside of their educator role and they see it as being police officers. And what we’ve spent decades doing is trying to help faculty reframe that and see responding to a mistake, whether it’s an honest mistake. Right? The student didn’t read the text carefully. The student just didn’t spend enough time on the assignment. They submitted a lackluster assignment, whether it’s that kind of honest mistake or a dishonest mistake.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:16:51]:

I asked I relied on Chat GPT way too much for this particular assignment. If we respond to them as mistakes, just like you would as a parent with your child, you want the the student to learn from it. Right? You wanna help them understand why it was wrong and maybe what they could do differently in the future, and you wanna help them grow and learn from it. So if we keep our educator hat on rather than feeling like police officers, that can help maybe not take away the personal feeling, but it’s a different personal. It it just it kinda switches it to say, well, this is personal because I personally care about learning. I care about facilitating learning, and I care about making sure that students graduate from here with the knowledge and skills that we say they do. So I’m gonna take it personally, but from a positive growth mindset kind of perspective rather than a disgruntled employee perspective. And we have choices.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:17:49]:

Right? We we can’t control what people do to us, but we can control how we react to them. And so it just seems like a healthier way to do it. Trust me. You will fail at it. Some days, you’ll be great at it. And other days, you’re having a bad day, you’re having a bad week, other stuff going on in your life, and you will and you will not be able to reframe it on that particular situation or that particular moment, and that’s okay because you’re human too.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:18:13]:

In terms of advice about approaching it, I realized that there’s there’s a whole lot of advice we can draw from to in terms of preventative measures. But let’s since you since you brought it up in terms of that very emotional feeling of a potential confrontation or even if it’s not a volatile one, but just we’re gonna have a conversation about what happened and and dig in there. Advice about how how helpful is it to at least recognize that taking it personally means that we care? You know, how much do you feel like we ought to disclose to a student? How how much is it helpful to just be very a neutral arbiter or does it totally depend on context and personality and strengths? Any thoughts as far as wisdom for those in those extreme moments where it kind of especially if someone hasn’t done it much, the those I think they call them sometimes heated moments or hot moments or something like that when they, in the literature.

David Rettinger [00:19:13]:

It’s okay. It is very contextual, and it’s very much about how you as an instructor respond to things more broadly. And and I hate to say it, but this is something that’s very much positional and, intersectional. Right? So as a as as a man who’s been doing this for twenty five years, my relationship with my students looks quite different than an an younger looking female presenting instructor. And I know that I I’ve heard stories from my colleagues about things that have never happened to me and probably wouldn’t. So it’s probably not fair for me to give advice and say, tell someone else how to handle their emotionality in a situation like this. I guess the thing to that I would say is take care of yourself first, whatever that looks like. It’s a first aid principle.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:20:02]:

Mhmm.

David Rettinger [00:20:02]:

Right? You’re never gonna help somebody else if you’re not on firm ground yourself. So whatever that looks like for you, take care of yourself first, acknowledge the student is also in need, whether or not they know that they’re in need. It’s important to recognize that second. And Trisha alluded to this, and I can’t emphasize it enough. Follow your institutional policy, please. No matter how bad it is, no matter how much you don’t like the institutional policy, nothing good ever comes of side gills and skirting policy and wink and a nudge. It just doesn’t work. It ends up making things worse either in the short run or in the long run.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:20:44]:

Yeah. I would I I wanted David to answer that first because he has had these conversations as an instructor, and I have had hundreds of them as somebody who’s meeting with a student on behalf of an instructor. And so my approach is gonna be slightly different, but maybe perhaps it it can provide ideas for faculty to do it. So I think of the book crucial conversations, and it says, basically, this is what I’ve observed. This is how I’m interpreting my observations, but I could be wrong. So I’d love to hear from you about this matter. And it it starts off with dignity and respect. You know, before I meet with a student, I make sure I know how to pronounce their name.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:21:26]:

I greet them by name. I thank them for coming in. I bring them into you all can’t see my office here, but I bring them into my office, which has a couch and two chairs, and I invite them to sit wherever makes them more comfortable. And right away, it sets off the conversation of even if they messed up, even if they’re gonna get sanctioned, they’re like, oh, she’s not going to point her finger at me and say, you’re a cheater. You’re a horrible human being. And that’s what they’re most afraid of, I would say. And so if you you could treat people with dignity and respect even as you’re calling out their mistake. Right? And then give the chance a student to tell us about their paper or their exam or whatever it whatever it is.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:22:09]:

And then if they’re still not telling you what they should be telling you, I I can say, frankly, that just doesn’t seem plausible to me. What you’re I hear what you’re saying. I appreciate you sharing that with me, but it doesn’t add up. Do you see how what you just said doesn’t make sense to explain what I’m what I’m seeing here on the paper? And so you can still again, this this you hinted at this earlier, challenge support. I can challenge them while being respectful. Right? And I think we’ve somehow lost a little bit of that in higher education that we think we have to be agreeable to be nice, and and I just don’t buy it. I I believe that we can be diplomatic and still challenge and push a little bit.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:22:50]:

Trisha, I think these three steps are gonna be so helpful to people that I want you to do it again. But this time, would you share a specific scenario so you can you already know I’m a cheater. No. Just kidding. Sorry. Little little comedy for everyone to lighten it up. I I am meeting with you today. I’m coming to see you because I have been reported as having a could you talk through the three steps and then maybe a phrase or two that you might say that you find helpful in each of those steps? So helpful, by the way.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:23:22]:

So good.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:23:24]:

Bonni, thank you so much for coming in. I know it’s super busy. What is it? Friday of second week. Right? Mhmm. How does how’s your term looking for you? How’s this this term looking for you?

Bonni Stachowiak [00:23:34]:

Oh, it’s so stressful. I’ve got multiple jobs, and I’m trying to play on our volleyball team, and it’s tough.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:23:40]:

Yeah. Oh my gosh. I was not a student athlete, but I can imagine. I know it’s really important here at our school that you’re invested in your athletics and in school, so I can only imagine how difficult that is. So you got the, you know, got the information that I sent you. You’ve read through all the documentation that I sent you. So we’re here to talk about poly 10, right? And your final essay in poly 10?

Bonni Stachowiak [00:24:02]:

Mhmm.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:24:03]:

Okay. So what the professor’s concerned about is that you used a lot of phrases that are pretty typical of what ChachiPT uses. And you actually has some fabricated quotations in there, like quotes that don’t actually exist, which is also pretty common for ChatGPT. And so he’s worried that you, in fact, maybe used ChatGPT a little bit or or a lot for this essay. So can you tell me more about what do you wanna tell me about this essay?

Bonni Stachowiak [00:24:33]:

And Yeah. So tell us We could Yeah. Tell us the three steps again just so people can have them in their minds.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:24:38]:

Here’s here’s what I’m noticing.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:24:40]:

Yep. Here’s what I’m noticing.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:24:41]:

Observed. Here’s what I’m how I’m interpreting those observations.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:24:45]:

K.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:24:45]:

But I could be wrong. So I’d love to hear from you and what you can tell me about the situation.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:24:51]:

Alright. Something else I want people to couple with this. Tell us about as we reflect on either in the moment or afterward, a scale of one to 10, where because it’s you mentioned, David, it’s impossible because our context are so different, our strengths, etcetera, etcetera. But, like, a good rule of thumb, how to how to, sort of like one of those pain scales, you know, or applying to ourself, how should I be thinking about maybe how heated I’m getting in the moment or even after the moment I’m carrying this around with me? What kind of a a a helpful scale do you have for us to be thinking about and reflecting on?

David Rettinger [00:25:31]:

I think that the best thing to do is I mean, they told us when we were little kids, count to 10, count to five. If you if you feel for me for me, it’s it’s my body that tells me when I need to Mhmm. Take a beat. I, you know, I can physically feel it in in my heart rate. My mouth gets dry. We’re all different that way, but that that’s me. And when that happens, that starts, it’s it’s not so much a number as a, is there a physical reaction that I’m having here? Heartbeat for some folks. For sometimes, it’s that little stomach flip.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:26:02]:

Mhmm.

David Rettinger [00:26:02]:

Whatever it is for you, you if you pay attention to your body, you’ll discover when that’s happening. And that, to me, it’s more like a red light, green light. And that those are the yellow lights that tell me that I might be approaching a point where I need to reevaluate how I’m responding. For a little story time, I had a a couple of students who basically cheated in exactly the same way on exactly the same assignment, and I brought them in one at a time. And I’d love to say I did it as well as Tricia just did. But the question I tend to ask them is, can you tell me a little bit about the process you used in completing this assignment? And that’s useful in lots of pedagogical ones as well. It’s that’s maybe the difference from what an instructor would ask and what someone would ask after the fact.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:26:44]:

Mhmm.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:26:45]:

And I ask that question too. Yeah. If we Yeah.

David Rettinger [00:26:47]:

Yep. I mean, just depends when you’re getting to it, really. And one of them just denied everything. That was the first one I talked to. And I could and I didn’t catch my emotions soon enough. And I more or less said, I think you’re lying and and you’re cheating. And she was upset and I was upset and Yeah. It didn’t go great.

David Rettinger [00:27:06]:

And then five minutes later, the next student came in, and I asked the same question. And the look on her face and there’s no way to say it. It looked like I killed her cat. I mean, it was terrible. And five minutes into that, she had explained what had gone wrong, and we talked about where we were going from there. And at by the end of it, I was reassuring her that she could still pass the class and that learning was the most important thing and all of those things that we like to do. And for me, the lesson I take back from that is it that that first one was was on me. I needed to dial back sooner.

David Rettinger [00:27:37]:

And I figured it out, but about maybe a bit too late. And and we all have those moments where you say, yeah, you know, I know exactly what I should have done.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:27:46]:

I love the idea of the counting. That’s helpful. For me, it’s it’s focusing on the breath. You I’m not sure if this was the book club or the book. It probably doesn’t matter, but I found it really helpful when you said you should be somewhere in a scale of no higher than a six on a scale of one to 10 in terms of the emotions underpinning that. If you’re getting higher than about a six, probably some reframing is necessary. I was that I thought I could have really used that. I don’t know where you were my first couple of years of teaching all those decades ago, but I could have really used that information.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:28:17]:

I’m able to maintain that almost a % of the time today, but I have a lot of years under my belt. So

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:28:23]:

Well, and I think that’s the key. Right? Like, we can tell you all sorts of strategies, but like with most things, you have to practice I I would say for faculty, it’s safe. It’s not my job. It’s not my job. But think of how much better of a communicator you’re gonna get and all those other difficult conversations you’re gonna have with your chair or at senate meetings or at home with your with your partner. Right? Like, these are skills that help us throughout our life, not just in talking with students after a cheating incident’s occurred.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:29:04]:

I am looking at the clock and cracking up at myself because I told you we were gonna have a conversation about AI and academic integrity, and, apparently, I can’t help myself because we haven’t had enough episodes about this topic. So first of all, I’m so thankful for your work and for your willingness to be here. I’m gonna ask a question specific to AI, but I also have this sense that so much of the things that you have to say about AI are very much the things that you’ve been saying about academic integrity in general. But let me just ask each of you to kind of respond specifically to artificial intelligence. If people were only gonna hear one thing today about how it might change the picture or just something you really wanna stress about artificial intelligence, and even if one of you wants to talk about it in relation to assessment security theater, which was another new term for me and really helpful for me to be able to name that. But anything you wanna say specific to artificial intelligence as it relates to supporting a flourishing academic integrity at our institutions and in our personal roles.

David Rettinger [00:30:15]:

I guess I’ll go first. I’ll talk about assessment, but not so much about security, but about the philosophy of assessment. COVID did this to us first, and now artificial intelligence is causing us to really recognize the limitations of the assessment regimes that we built up over the centuries in Western Higher Ed. Right? Multiple choice exams, essays, research papers, historically have been of some use anyway in establishing the whether students have achieved the learning objectives that we set out for them. Having said that, many of those learning objectives were very content based. How much do you know about x? And as the world has changed, as Google has existed, for example, you don’t need to know so much about anything that you can Google. You need to have different kinds of ways of interacting with knowledge. So the entire construction of knowledge has changed as a result of these changes in these technologies, but our assessments have not.

David Rettinger [00:31:17]:

And so our what artificial intelligence, generative artificial intelligence to be specific, is doing for us is decoupling writing from thinking in some really interesting ways. It is possible to create a reasonably well formed document about something that you do not at all understand now. That has not really been true in the past, and it’s only getting truer by the day. And so, therefore, writing about something, especially writing about something asynchronously, is no longer meaningfully associated with knowledge, if it ever was. And so now we’re left with the question, we we’ve lost our best assessment tool, which is the written assignment. So if we are to find something new or reclaim the written assignment, that’s maybe the best way to say this. Our next assignment as as educators is to figure out how we are going to assess knowledge in the age of artificial intelligence.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:32:18]:

Yeah. And and to be clear, before AI, there was and still exists the whole billion plus dollar contract cheating industry. But that was, of course, accessible mostly to students with means, with money to pay someone else, another human to do their assignments for them. And now, really, the Gen AI stuff is free. Yes. You get limited tokens if you’re only using the free version, but still, it’s free and it’s democratized. Everybody has access to it as long as you have bandwidth and, Wi Fi in it and a device. So it it has changed things.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:32:48]:

With regards to the assessment security theater, I think we wanna think about assessment security in very very different ways, a variety of ways, I’m trying to say. So when we think about secure assessments, I I’m a teacher of a 600 person classroom. I’m gonna go back to Blue Books in class. If you’re not checking IDs, if you’re not able to proctor 600 students taking those tests in your class, that’s you’re not probably really having that secure of a test. It’s certainly more secure than a computer based test that the students are taking at home, but there’s still a lot that can happen there. Maybe, you know and especially we got meta glasses now. The students can look you know, can can get AI help in those in person classes too. So when we think about assessment security, we want faculty to think creatively.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:33:38]:

So a group of faculty here at UC San Diego came up with oral assessments as a as a check on written assessments during COVID, and that went extremely well, and they scaled it up to at least, 250 person classrooms. We can think of flipped classrooms where students are actually doing the work in class. They’re doing the assignments. They’re doing the the process. They’re doing the problems, the case studies, whatever in class with each other and with the professor that can provide assessment security. So there’s all different ways to think of it. And but throwing, plopping up third party proctoring software on students’ devices that they’re taking from home, that is borders on assessment security theater.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:21]:

You mentioned BlueBooks, and I am going to ask slash assume that that wouldn’t necessarily be your first go to. My understanding is it can be discriminatory against people with disabilities. So the if we wanna, like this person right here gets to use a different tool and point out the fact that they’re disabled because they’re the only one who is using some other tool. And I realize all of these have their limitations, but I don’t think you’re from having read the book, I don’t think you’re advocating that’s the best approach to

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:34:50]:

to go. In fact, I I I would say that it’s it can be an approach, but unless you’re putting in all these other academic integrity strategies, they are not the solution. At, UC San Diego and across the University of California system, we are and we’ve already done this here, and we’re looking at implementing it across the system, assessment computer based assessment centers. So that student the entire class you know, frankly, I wanna I I want to get faculty out of the business of administering exams. I think it’s not a good use of TA faculty time. I want to free up their time to spend it with students teaching them. And so instead of taking two or three classes in your term to give an exam, you’re sending them to a compute this computer based assessment center, and and we’re administering those assessments for you. And that allows for mastery based testing because we can individualize the assessments and so students can have retakes and second chances.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:35:42]:

And we know that mastery based testing reduces equity gaps, particularly in STEM, and we know that frequent testing improves learning. So it’s a win win win for equity, for integrity, for learning. And so that would be my go my go to choice.

David Rettinger [00:35:58]:

And zooming out from that, that’s I think that’s a brilliant strategy, but it’s also one example of the bigger point, which is it’s time for change.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:36:07]:

Yes.

David Rettinger [00:36:08]:

So getting faculty out of the exam industry, getting out of the exam industry entirely. Authentic assessment is a buzzword, and you can use a buzzword well or you can use a buzzword badly. But to the extent that people ask the question, what assessment really aligns with my learning objectives?

Bonni Stachowiak [00:36:26]:

Mhmm.

David Rettinger [00:36:27]:

Then you’re being authentic. That’s that’s my definition of authentic assessment. And so sometimes that is an essay, and you have to figure out how to secure it. Sometimes that is multiple choice questions. I’ve never come across that time, but sometimes it it could happen. Maybe just people are better at writing them than I am. But it doesn’t really matter what the assessment is. If it lines up with the learning objectives, if it’s thoughtfully done, if it’s engaging to students, it’s going to be a good alternative.

David Rettinger [00:36:55]:

And and if you think about a Blue Book, it’s none of those things.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:36:58]:

And I think not every assessment has to be secure. Right? There’s formative assessments, assessments for learning. There’s summative assess assessments, assessments of learning. And our colleagues in Australia talk about this, particularly Phil Dawson, if people aren’t familiar with his work at Deakin University, that we need to start thinking about secure assessments at a programmatic level rather than a course by course basis. Because we don’t want it. Frequent testing’s good, but overly testing has also got some problems. And so really thinking about, as David said, we it it’s not it we can’t tweak around the edges anymore. We really have to kind of radically rethink how we’re doing assessment in the age of AI.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:37:36]:

Oh, I’m so glad I I asked because you just you just gave us such wonderful ways to close this part of the conversation. And, of course, now I’m not gonna close the conversation because I wanna circle all the way back to something David said very early on for the listeners. David was really emphasizing following the procedures, and I’m not sure that I gave enough time to really stress. Yes. Of course. Follow the procedures for reasons that might be obvious to you, but as someone who’s still new to this field and learning from Tricia and David, a big reason is because if you don’t follow the procedures, then you inadvertently create even more cheating going on. Or if you don’t if you don’t if you aren’t putting in practices like authentic assessment and the other elements of I can’t remember if you used Swiss cheese as an analogy or if that’s somebody else that use. Swiss cheese is coming up a lot in my Yeah.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:38:35]:

In life right now as analogies. But but if you’re not doing those things, then we just contribute to a system where I look to my left, I look to my right, and I go, well, everybody else is doing it. I mean, it makes it really difficult then to create an environment in which academic integrity is able to thrive the way we would want it to. Yeah.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:38:54]:

See, Bonni, despite your story that you’re still embarrassed about, you are a very, very good student. You’ve learned you’ve you’ve really learned.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:39:03]:

Right? You’re

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:39:04]:

it’s I think it’s important for us to remember to be give grace to ourselves. I think most of us might think of a cheating story. I I can think of a couple that I almost cheated, and I don’t know. I might I might have, I think, in my computer science course. Right?

Bonni Stachowiak [00:39:19]:

But so

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:39:19]:

I think we all have those stories if we’re really, really honest with ourselves.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:39:22]:

So Yeah.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:39:23]:

I I appreciate you sharing it.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:39:24]:

Well and thank you for saying that about me being a student too because you you were mentioning everything doesn’t have to be tested. And, I mean, in the ideal world, we’d be doing this because we want to learn, and the learning would be so aligned with our goals and our values that it wouldn’t even occur to us. So my, kids are still young enough that a lot of their learning happens that way, and it’s so beautiful to see. And yet I see, despite the fact that they are receiving the best education I could imagine from a wonderful, wonderful school and tremendous teachers, the system does try to suck that out of people, you know, with the way that we have it structured if we don’t go through, like you said, and rethink it. So Yeah. Well, this is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. I’ll be short on this, but I do not mean it at all shortly. Of course, I want to recommend this book.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:40:13]:

Everyone needs to immediately go. Get yourself a copy of The Opposite of Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI. And I wanted to mention that, actually, we’re doing at my university, book club on John Warner’s More Than Words, how to think about writing in an age of AI. And it was during that book club that a colleague mentioned David and Trisha’s book and also that there was this Perusall book club. So I’m telling you these books go really, really well together. They couple really nicely. So if you’re familiar with his work, really nice. And then vice versa too, I would say if you wanted to think a little bit more specifically about writing, he has some really wonderful things to say.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:40:58]:

So the other thing I wanna recommend real quick is that a follow-up to episode number 555, I have heard from a ton of people about the episode with Chris Ostro. The topic was a big picture look at AI detection tools. And so if you really wanna learn more about that, if you missed episode five fifty five, go back and go back and take a listen. If you wanna learn even more from Chris, he heard from so many people who heard that episode that he created a video about taking a mosaic approach to AI in the writing classroom, and he expanded on sharing some of his approaches that he uses. And he has what I could clumsily describe as a very balanced approach, which is very balanced just seems so it doesn’t seem sufficient to describe David and Trisha your book, but MOSAIC really does seem to be a better word of a descriptor. So he’s not extreme in any direction, very practical, very based on integrity, and based on excellent teaching. So those are my recommendations. And one more quick one.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:42:08]:

Chris mentioned he tagged me on LinkedIn and then said I don’t even remember how it came up, but said something about doctor Flux, which I was not familiar with doctor Flux’s work. I’m probably gonna save it for a future episode. Maybe he’ll even come on the show, but one of the things he does really well is create videos. And there’s a video I’d like you to take a look at. It’s about two or three minutes long, and it’s how Van Gogh informs my AI course policy. And, of course, because everything I see right now is reminding me of David and Trisha’s book, I saw it and I thought, well, here’s another really practical thing that we could do early on in our courses, tying our policy around AI with our values and our pedagogy. And, I mean, he just creates this really engaging case for why sometimes they might use it, but sometimes we’re not. And it does have to do with Van Gogh.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:43:01]:

And to find out more, you’ll have to go watch his video because I need to pass it over to Tricia for whatever she’d like to recommend.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:43:08]:

I’ll second your recommendation on the episode with Chris that you did. That was the other one that I listened to. I was trying to remember before we started recording, so it was very good. And I do I do second that recommendation. I wanna recommend Unexplainable, which is a podcast from Vox Media. In particular, their series called Good Robot. It’s a four part series, and it’s really looking at Gen AI, not so much to do with education, but just in general, looking at the industry industry and the players behind the scenes, including OpenAI and Anthropic and and, of course, Elon Musk and looking at just what is behind their kind of their motivations, some of the explanations for what we’re seeing, which I which I’m calling intentional entanglement, which I got from another podcast called from the Center for Humane Technology. Oh, shoot.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:44:04]:

You’re undivided attention where they were talking about the forever chemical industry and how it’s how what they what those companies did is the same as what AI companies are doing, which is intentional entanglement. They put out the product there knowing about the harms that it’s gonna cause and then tell us, well, everybody’s using it, everybody’s doing it, so you have to incorporate it in. So I highly recommend your undivided attention, recent episode about the forever chemicals, and then the unexplainable good robot four part part series.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:44:35]:

Oh my goodness. And we’re having this conversation on a Friday afternoon, and I just feel like, okay. I just wanna stop everything and go go dig in. And I have a feeling David’s gonna be very similar to me wanting to learn more. What do you have to share tonight, David?

David Rettinger [00:44:50]:

I’ve got all sorts of stuff. I’m gonna I’m gonna do the full soup to nuts kinda thing. First thing I wanna recommend is the International Center for Academic Integrity. I know that a lot of folks listening are probably coming from the teaching and learning side of our world, and I wanna highlight the the where Tricia and I got to start working together, which is an organization that was put together to do research on and to promote academic integrity. Academicintegrity.org, everybody. We’ve both been president over the years, and it’s meant a lot to our professional lives. We have a great conference. It’s some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet, and so come join us in the spring.

David Rettinger [00:45:27]:

In terms of media, let me start with the work stuff, which is two books on metacognition. I’m a cognitive psychologist by training. And I think if we’re serious about teaching and learning, we should ask the question, how do people really learn from from that perspective? So I’m a huge fan of Make It Stick. I’m sure many of you are familiar with it. It’s Roddy Roediger’s book and the the folks out of Washington University in Saint Louis. And then Study Like a Champ, which is Regan a.R. Gurnug and John Dunlosky’s book. That I gave that to my daughter, and I think it’s an incredibly useful way to think about learning from a student perspective and make it stick is from a a more holistic perspective. In terms of fun stuff, I started watching The Resonance recently on Netflix, and it it’s a mystery, and it’s cracking me up, and it’s surreal, and it’s weird, and I’d recommend it highly.

David Rettinger [00:46:21]:

Going back in time, there’s a book by Richard Powers called Galatea 2.2. I taught it in a science fiction and psych class about a million years ago, and it’s it’s a retelling of the Pygmalion story using what would now be called generative artificial intelligence. It’s it’s both dated and timely at the same time, which takes some doing. You have to be a pretty good writer to do that. Lastly, I’m gonna pitch something that you might not expect, which is Tulsa, Oklahoma. It’s a cool town. People highly underrated. I’ve lived here for about two years, and I genuinely love it.

David Rettinger [00:46:55]:

And I’m pretty sure we have more James Beard finalists this year than some much, much bigger cities.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:47:01]:

This has been so fun. I feel like I just got a syllabus to a class that I can’t wait to take. But I already did

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:47:07]:

feel that David cheated, though. He gave way too many recommendations. So

Bonni Stachowiak [00:47:11]:

Yes. Our podcast production support person’s gonna be like, what? Oh, such good stuff, though. Thanks to both of you, both for the conversation today for this wonderful book, and I’m so glad to have been introduced to both of you and get to learn from both of you in such different ways. I’m so grateful for each of you and and for the time you’re sharing today.

Tricia Bertram Gallant [00:47:32]:

Thanks, Bonni.

David Rettinger [00:47:33]:

Thank you so much for having us.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:47:37]:

Thanks once again to Tricia Bertram Gallant and David Rettinger for joining me on today’s episode. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever talented Andrew Kroeger. Podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Priest. If you’ve been listening for a while and have yet to sign up for the weekly updates, now is your moment. You don’t wanna miss these show notes. Head over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. You’ll receive the most recent episodes show notes as well as some other resources that go above and beyond what you’ll see there.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:48:18]:

Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.