US Teacher Beats Exam Cheating With New Tricks After Kenyan Academic Writers Exposé

by Geoffrey Lutta on Thursday, 26 January 2023 - 6:06 pm

File photo showing a student using written material to answer exam questions.

HR Daily

An associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the US is using new tricks to beat the exam cheating menace.

Speaking to National Public Radio (NPR) on Thursday, January 26, the university lecturer alluded to recent research involving over 20,000 Kenyans in an academic writing syndicate helping foreign students.

The exposé showed how Kenyans were paid between Ksh2,700 to Ksh10,000 to write essays for different students in the US and UK.

"I think everyone is cheating. There was an estimate from UK that right now, 20,000 are employed full-time in Kenya just to write essays for people," the teacher stated.

File photo of a person typing on a computer keyboard.

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To beat the exam cheating menace, the lecturer adopted ChatGPT, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) bot.

Using the AI platform, the lecturer allows his students to get hints and insights on how to respond to questions and school queries.

"This was a sudden change, right? There is a lot of good stuff that we are going to have to do differently but I think we could solve the problems of how we teach people to write in a world with ChatGPT," he told NPR.

Besides using ChatGPT, the lecturer advocates for the adoption of AI policy. He teaches classes in entrepreneurship and innovation.

"I think everybody is cheating ... I mean, it's happening. So what I'm asking students to do is just be honest with me," he insisted.

"Tell me what they use ChatGPT for, tell me what they used as prompts to get it to do what they want, and that's all I'm asking from them. We're in a world where this is happening but now, it's just going to be at an even grander scale," he added.

According to a University of Pennsylvania associate professor, the policy promotes technology adoption.

Despite his decision to adopt ChatGPT, some institutions in the US are banning the AI bot.

The new policies came amidst a scandal involving the open AI platform. According to Time Magazine, Open AI borrowed a leaf from Facebook to contract a firm from Kenya to detect toxic language.

Kenyan workers were outsourced and paid to moderate content on the platform.