Google tool makes AI cheating easier, teachers say

from Carolyn JonesCalMatters

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A few months ago, a high school English teacher in Los Angeles Unified noticed something different about his students’ tests. Students who struggled all semester suddenly got excellent grades. He suspected some were cheating, but he couldn’t figure out how.

Until a student showed him the latest version of Google Lens.

Google recently made the visual search tool easier to use in the company’s Chrome browser. When users click on an icon hidden in the toolbar, a floating bubble pops up. Wherever the bubble is placed, a sidebar appears with an AI response, description, explanation, or interpretation of whatever is inside the bubble. For students, it provides an easy way to cheat on numerical tests without entering a prompt or even leaving the page. All they have to do is click.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said teacher Dustin Stevenson. “It’s hard enough to teach in the age of AI, and now we have to navigate it?”

Keeping up with students’ cheating methods has always been a cat-and-mouse game for teachers. But some now say AI tools, especially Lens, have made it impossible to enforce academic integrity in the classroom — with potentially harmful long-term effects on student learning.

“terrible idea”

Lens has been around for almost a decade. This is the camera technology that scans QR codes or identifies objects in photos. But as AI has evolved, its uses have expanded and Google has made it more accessible to users, especially those using Chrome, Google’s browser.

During school closures due to COVID, most California school districts gave students Chromebook laptops for remote work. Thousands of these laptops actually were donated by Google. After schools reopened for face-to-face learning, schools continued to use Chromebooks, making them an integral part of classroom learning.

Millions of California’s 5.8 million K-12 students use Chromebooks, making it the most popular laptop option in schools.

For William Heusler, a high school ethnic studies teacher in Los Angeles, the ubiquity of Chromebooks was the first red flag.

“After COVID-19, it was clear that Chromebooks were a terrible idea in my classroom,” Heusler said. Students used the laptops to play games during class, watch soccer games, and focus on anything but the lesson plan.

Then came AI, with its huge potential to improve education — and make cheating easier. That’s when Heusler decided to completely ditch technology in his classroom and go back to the basics: pencil and paper. Tests, homework, and class assignments are on paper. The school already bans cell phones.

It’s more work for him, but it’s worth it, he said.

“We want teenagers to think independently, to express their opinions, to learn to think critically,” Heusler said. “But if we give them a tool that allows them not to develop those skills, I’m not sure we’re really helping them. Can you go through life not knowing how to write, how to express yourself? I don’t know, but I hope not.”

AI and cognitive activity

Heuisler is not alone, according to research from the Center for Democracy and Technology. In a recent national survey, the organization found that more than 70 percent of teachers said AI made them worry about whether students’ work was actually theirs. Nearly 75% of teachers say they worry that students aren’t learning important skills like writing, research, and reading comprehension.

The impact on student learning appears real, according to a recent MIT study. The study, “Your brain in ChatGPT“found that students who used AI to help them write essays showed significantly less cognitive activity than those who did not, and were often unable to recall details of the essays they had just written. The essays themselves were also of poorer quality, with limited ideas, sentence structures, and vocabulary compared to essays written by students who did not rely on AI.

However, about 85 percent of teachers and students use AI in the classroom, the Center for Democracy and Technology found. Teachers use it for organize lesson plans and assessment documentsand students use it to do things like research and brainstorm.

Lack of consistent rules

But the rules surrounding its use vary widely. The California Department of Education offers extensive guidelines about how teachers can use AI in the classroom, but without strict requirements – even regarding students using AI to cheat. One video urges teachers not to punish students caught using AI to write an essay. Instead, the video encourages teachers to come up with essay tasks that can’t be easily typed by a machine, or requires students to provide their notes and cite the AI ​​just as they would any other source for an essay.

Even in schools, teachers have different rules about AI. Some encourage students to incorporate AI into their work, while others ban it outright. A a recent RAND study research organization found that only 34% of teachers said their school or district had consistent policies related to AI and cheating, and 80% of students said their teachers did not provide guidance on how to use AI for schoolwork.

That confusion is the crux of the problem, said Alix Gallagher, director of Policy Analysis for California Education, which has studied the use of AI in schools. Because there are few clear rules regarding the use of AI, students and teachers tend to have “significantly” different views about what constitutes cheating, according to a recent report by the educational nonprofit Project Tomorrow.

“Because adults are not clear, it’s not really surprising that children are not clear,” Gallagher said. “It’s the adults’ responsibility to fix this, and if the adults don’t get on the same page, they’re going to make it harder for kids who actually want to do the ‘right’ thing.”

Districts need to provide high-quality training for teachers and consistent policies for using AI in the classroom so everyone knows what the rules are and teachers know how to navigate the new technology, she said.

Unsustainable?

In Hilary Freeman’s government class at Piedmont High School near Oakland, artificial intelligence is all but forbidden. If students use AI to write a paper, they get a zero. It only allows students to use AI to summarize complex concepts, write practice questions for self-assessment, or when Freeman specifically allows it for a specific task.

She appreciates that artificial intelligence can sometimes be useful, but worries that it’s too easy for students to use it as a crutch.

“Reasoning, logic, problem solving, writing — these are skills that students need,” Freeman said. “I’m afraid we’re going to have a generation with huge cognitive gaps in critical thinking skills… That really worries me. I want their future to be bright.”

Discovering students’ use of AI is another hurdle, she said. This means spending time digging into the revision histories of students’ work or using an AI plagiarism screener, which are sometimes inaccurate and more likely yes flag english learners.

“It’s a huge ‘addition’ to my work and it doesn’t seem sustainable,” Freeman said.

Digital literacy and academic integrity

Google, meanwhile, has no plans to remove Lens from its Chrome browsers yet, even on school laptops, although it continues to test various levels of accessibility. Recently paused a Lens “homework help” shortcut button in response to user feedback.

The tech giant is encouraging students and teachers to learn more about the positive and ethical uses of AI and how it can improve learning. It has also invested more than $40 million in AI literacy for students and teachers over the past few years.

“Students have told us they value tools that help them learn and understand things visually, so we’re running tests offering an easier way to access Lens while browsing,” said Google spokesman Craig Ewer. “We continue to work closely with educators and partners to improve the usefulness of our tools that support the learning process.”

School administrators also have the option to disable Lens on district-issued Chromebooks.

Los Angeles Unified decided to keep Lens on its student laptops, at least for now, because the tool has many positive uses, so students should have an opportunity to explore the technology, a district spokesperson said.

But the district has put some safeguards in place: The tool is only available to students who have completed a digital literacy lesson, and students and teachers must follow the district’s rules for academic integrity and responsible use of technology. These rules include prohibitions against plagiarism and fraud.

“As new digital tools evolve, we continually evaluate how they are used in our schools. When certain technologies or features may raise concerns, we carefully analyze the risks, benefits and overall impact on the learning environment,” a district spokesperson said.

This is not the field’s first challenge with AI technology. In 2024, boss Alberto Carvalho revealed nearly $3 million a chatbot named Ed, only to postpone it three months later when the company laid off half its staff.

Meanwhile, Stevenson said Lens disappeared from his students’ Chromebooks last week after he alerted the district that some students were using it to cheat.

“This is encouraging, but it also reveals how haphazard the introduction of AI has been,” Stevenson said. “Teachers and school leaders spend countless hours thinking about every detail of the learning experience, then Google completely undermines it with the click of a button. That’s not the way education should work.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.