In his New York Times essay “There’s Really Only One Way to Stop Students From Cheating,” Adam Grant argues that the answer is to build students’ moral identity: make cheating inconsistent with the person they want to be.
I think he’s right about character.
But I think he dismisses another response too quickly.
Grant notes that many teachers are returning to in-class essays and oral exams. “Creating obstacles is never going to be enough,” he writes.
If their purpose is only to make cheating harder, he’s right.
But an oral exam is not primarily an obstacle.
It is a measurement.
I’ve spent twenty-five years teaching students one-on-one. I often ask a student to put a passage or assignment away and explain it - in their own words. Then I ask how the parts connect. Why does one point follow from another? What evidence would change the conclusion?
The difference between following an explanation and being able to reconstruct one is often striking.
AI makes that distinction more urgent. It did not create it.
A finished assignment has always been indirect evidence of learning: we look at the work and infer that the student did the thinking required to produce it.
AI didn’t make learning impossible to measure. It made that inference impossible to trust.
A study published in Science this year, based on responses from more than 95,000 students, called for universities to reform assessment rather than rely on blanket bans or detection systems.
The problem is not only that students can break the rules more easily. It is that the work we collect may no longer tell us what they understand.
This also changes the incentive to cheat.
If the finished paper is what earns the grade, students will optimize the paper. If they also have to explain, reconstruct, defend, or apply the idea, outsourcing the thinking becomes much less useful.
A five-minute check can be simple:
Close the laptop.
Put the work away.
Tell me what you argued - in your own words.
Why does the second point follow from the first?
What would weaken your argument?
The purpose is not to catch the student. It is to find out whether the student can do the thinking.
That distinction - between completing a task and developing the capacity the task was meant to exercise - is central to my Functional Learning work.
Grant is right that character matters. But oral assessment is more than a way to prevent cheating.
It is one way to find out whether the work produced understanding.