Top Queens HS bans take-home essays over AI cheating fears | Latest Tech News
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An elite Queens high college is forcing college students to ditch keyboards for pens as a approach to stop them from utilizing ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence instruments to cheat, The Post has discovered.
In a transfer that has some college students fuming, Townsend Harris High School is ending its long-standing coverage of letting children sort summer time studying essays at home, and instead making them full the graded project by hand during the first weeks of September.
The project, a back-to-school ceremony of passage, sometimes requires college students to read a guide over the summer time for their English class and flip in a written essay when they return to class.
Townsend Harris High School college students will now write their summer time studying essays fully by hand in early September, marking the end of the standard take-home project. Helayne Seidman
“We’ve noticed too much use of artificial intelligence in the past and think in-class will allow for a more authentic representation of student thinking,” English trainer Brian Sweeney told The Classic, the student-run newspaper.
Critics argue the coverage unfairly lumps all college students together and might make the project more about velocity than precise comprehension.
“I think it’s unfair that we are being held accountable for other students’ misusing AI,” one pupil told The Classic.
Another incoming pupil griped that she prefers at-home assignments for time management and that the new rule “brings a problem to people who struggle with writing at a faster pace.”
Yasmeen Ismail, a junior and co-editor-in-chief of The Classic, called the change a affordable first step.
Junior Yasmeen Ismail, co-editor-in-chief of The Classic, called the rule change a affordable step but argued colleges also need long-term methods for managing AI. Obtained by the New York Post
“Long term, we need policies that go beyond just restricting improper use,” she told The Post.
Defending the transfer, rising senior and fellow co-editor-in-chief Ryan Chen said it would help keep the project honest.
“This heavily encourages students to physically read the book cover-to-cover instead of using AI to give them a summary and an analysis in minutes,” he said.
The coverage comes amid mounting pressure in school rooms nationwide with AI driving a wave of copy-and-paste schoolwork. Inconsistent guidelines are leaving children confused — and pressured to cheat just to keep up, they are saying.
Many Gen Z college students now rely on AI to get through college, with 97% of 2,000 high college and school children in a May survey saying they’ve used instruments like ChatGPT.
English trainer Brian Sweeney told The Classic the coverage goals to present a more “authentic” snapshot of pupil writing expertise by eradicating AI from the equation. Brian Sweeney/ Linkedin
“It’s really hard to be a student who’s trying to follow the rules right now,” Scheherazade Schonfeld, a rising junior at Hunter College HS, a top-performing public college run by CUNY, told The Post. “It feels almost competitive, like not using [AI] puts you at a disadvantage.”
Her college doesn’t have a blanket ban on AI, and ChatGPT is routinely used by many classmates, she said. Some academics brazenly permit it, while others take into account it cheating. The guidelines range from class to class, and enforcement is inconsistent, Schonfeld said.
Schonfeld estimated that Hunter College HS is “only catching 10% of the [AI use] cases, probably less,” though the shortage of formal guidelines means academics aren’t always watching for it.
Kim Hong, a junior at a Holmdel High School in New Jersey, said she’s seen college students in her college get flagged over AI suspicion for one thing as minor as utilizing the phrase “underscore” in an essay.
Ryan Chen, junior co-editor-in-chief of The Classic, says the in-class essays will push college students to totally read the assigned books somewhat than rely on AI summaries and fast online analyses. Obtained by the New York Post
The lack of readability has left both college students and academics scrambling.
“High school should be where you learn how to write and how to think,” Schonfeld told The Post. “ChatGPT hasn’t eliminated the need for that, but teachers also need to show us how to use it the smart way. That’s hard, because they’re learning right alongside us.”
Townsend HS’ crackdown comes at odds with a broader shift in schooling coverage.
NYC’s Department of Education lifted a 2023 ban on ChatGPT just months after saying it but still hasn’t issued clear guidelines on pupil usage. The DOE says it’s developing an AI framework and lately launched an AI Policy Lab to help colleges navigate moral implementation.
And last month, the United Federation of Teachers joined it’s father or mother, the American Federation of Teachers, in a $23 million partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic to prepare educators on how to use AI in the classroom. A new “National Center for AI” will open inside the UFT’s Lower Manhattan headquarters.
New Jersey junior Kim Hong says she’s seen classmates accused of AI cheating over small phrase selections, fueling anxiety about where colleges draw the road. Obtained by the New York Post
Punya Mishra, director of the Learning Futures Institute at Arizona State University, said Townsend needs to be focusing on bringing AI into the classroom, somewhat than locking it out.
“Handwriting essays in class can make sense in certain cases,” Mishra said. “But blanket policies like this take away educators’ ability to teach students how to work with AI critically and wisely.”
Frances Kweller, director of the Manhattan- and Queens-based tutoring company Kweller Prep, celebrated Townsend’s strategy as a obligatory step.
“This is reality. AI is the future,” she said. “You need to make sure students know how to be independent thinkers.”
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