Student shortcuts and time on task

Whilst surely most students come to university to learn, accepting the loss of earning power and, depending on the country, considerable costs from living expenses and fees, there are some who may just come to get the credentials. If you don’t think that learning itself is important, or if you don’t understand how or feel unable to do it, then you will naturally look for other ways to achieve those important credentials. You may even not feel that you are cheating; it may just feel like taking a shortcut.

Maybe everyone is taking shortcuts on your course. What is a shortcut? In pre-internet days, it might be finding a book in the library which contains all the problems your tutors are setting you, together with the answers, and using these to ‘help’ you complete the problems. And in fact maybe it is helpful, maybe you are learning something by doing this. Or maybe a shortcut is sitting together with your friends on the same course to solve the problems together. Or is that a good thing? Are you learning from each other? Or how about if the teachers use the same problems from year to year, only changing the numbers, and there is a tradition of people in the year above you passing last year’s questions and correct solutions on, so you can see how to complete the problems?

What if your friend reads through your essay and helps you to improve it? What if you are feeling ill and your friend finishes it for you? What if you just couldn’t get started and the deadline is tomorrow and your friend tells you about a site where you can pay a very reasonable sum for someone to create a ‘sample’ essay to give you some ideas?

Strategies for getting help with your work, taking shortcuts with your work, and blurring the line into cheating have been around for ever. Students who could afford better help had better access in the past, but now everyone can do it, since there are many more places to find information. Sure, straight copying from internet pages became more difficult when the university adopted similarity-checking software, but there were always ways to change the text to make it different. Right now we may be faced with a new challenge with student shortcuts, but the principles of looking at them are the same ones we have always used to tackle new tools: think about what is important, ensure we are examining it, add conditions to the examination if we need them.

Time on task

In the context of shortcuts, the availability of generative AI tools gives us challenges with work which is done entirely at home. Access to substantial well-written outputs is now free, or cheap, for all students, not just those who could pay a contract cheating company. Ethan Mollick (2024) has pointed out that the systems which will break due to AI are those which depended, to a large degree, on time spent on a document (or length of the document) as a measure of quality. Of course, time spent is not the only thing being assessed in an essay or a report, but it is definitely an implicit element of the judgement. It would be rare to hear something as specific as “If you spend 75 (constructive) hours on this 3000 word essay, you should be able to get a B”, but in our heads, teachers are used to thinking about how much time the student had to do the work and what the end result might look like. We need to be thinking about this quite hard. For instance:

If a student has 75 hours AND access to GAI tools, what kind of work can I expect from them at this level? Can I expect higher order thinking than I did before? Or is that unfair to the students?
What basics must I be certain they can do, which I might have to test by controlling time, place, or resources: foundational knowledge, writing, coding, mathematical skills, interpersonal skills?

You will need to think about whether 'time spent on task' is important to student achievement, and if so, which tasks you are prioritising, and how you supervise them to ensure they are valid, secure, and fair and that enough time has been spent on them. We will look at this in the next part of the module.

Summary: You will already have figured out that these GAI tools may have some benefits. They can save time on tasks which might be boring or where humans might be inaccurate, such as summarising, counting, comparing, checking grammar, for instance. Maybe these are useful shortcuts. Think about what is absolutely essential for your students to be able to do on their own, and then figure out how to assess them securely. You may need to use controlled forms of examination in the short term (we will look at this later in the module), but over time, as the tools develop and you become more confident in thinking about them, your decisions may change. Just take this thinking one step at a time.