5 Ways to Stop AI Cheating

At 22, I left LA for a traditional Oxford education. I mocked it then—but this stodgy approach might be our best hope right now.

The level of AI cheating is now so extreme that many fear we’ve reached a point of no return.

• “Everyone is cheating their way through college,” New York magazine recently announced. “ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project.”

• The Wall Street Journal has reached a similar conclusion: “There’s a good chance your kid uses AI to cheat,” declared a recent article.

• “AI cheating is getting worse,” The Atlantic agrees, and “colleges don’t have a plan.”

Recent headlines

Even worse, cheaters are getting all the rewards. A Columbia student recently got kicked out for cheating—and he turned around and raised millions to turn his system into a startup.

Should we give up hope? Is it really game over?

I don’t think so. Because I have firsthand experience of a superior system that prevents all AI cheating.

Here’s my story:

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When I was 22 years old, I woke up one morning in a hot dingy apartment on the cusp of South Central LA—where I’d been sleeping on the floor. I grabbed two suitcases I’d packed the night before, and caught a ride to the Los Angeles International Airport.

There I boarded a budget flight on Laker Airways, which was absolutely the cheapest way to cross the Atlantic—just $368. But this was the ultimate in no-frills travel. They didn’t even provide food for a ten-hour flight. So my carry-on luggage included some cold fried chicken, purchased from Col. Sanders the day before.

My destination was the University of Oxford—a place I’d never seen and only knew through hearsay and Hollywood movies.

Laurel and Hardy’s comedy film A Chump at Oxford had made a big impression on me as a youngster. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was when I learned it had been filmed on a studio lot in LA, not at Oxford.

But now I was going to experience the real thing—whatever that was.

I had a scholarship and an acceptance letter. Beyond that I arrived with very little—some clothes, toiletries, a few vinyl jazz records, and whatever was left of the Colonel’s chicken.

I had few expectations. But I felt ready for anything.

I was in for a shock.

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I said that I traveled to Oxford by plane, but it might as well have been a time machine. The educational system at Oxford hadn’t changed in hundreds of years.

In fact, nothing had changed at Oxford in centuries.

Just compare Turner’s painting of Oxford’s High Street from 1810 with that same location today—and you get the idea.

This might have shocked any young American, but I was more unsettled than most. I’d grown up in an LA neighborhood where everything had been built in the last few years—and most of it would get demolished or vandalized or remade in the near future.

I go back to my home town now, and everything has changed. But when I last returned to Oxford, nothing had moved a centimeter.

I like tradition. I love old buildings. I could handle those.

But the old-fashioned approach to teaching and college life was beyond anything I’d anticipated. You could have set me down in Hogwarts and given me a flying broom, and I could hardly be as shocked as I was during my first weeks at Oxford.

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How old-fashioned was it? Where do I even begin?

For a start I had to buy a cap and gown—for daily use! I wore my gown to the dining hall every evening. Here grace was intoned in Latin (I still know it word for word), and all sorts of crazy rules from the past were imposed on newbies.

1. I was forbidden from looking at the paintings on the wall.

2. I was forbidden from looking at the head table.

3. I was forbidden from talking about my subject of study.

4. I was forbidden from speaking in a modern foreign language (more than five words). Ancient languages were okay.

5. Etc. etc. etc.

These rules applied to everybody, not just me. But nobody gave you a list, or told you about them upfront.

You only learned about the laws by breaking them—or seeing some other unlucky student do so.

Violators were severely punished—typically with sconcing (a shameful ritual which I prefer not to discuss). But I could send an appeal to the dons at head table, and perhaps avoid the penalty.

There was just one catch—the appeal had to be written in an ancient language.

(People typically relied on Latin for these appeals, and occasionally ancient Greek. I knew of one instance when a student used Hebrew for his appeal, but it was rejected—none of the scholars at head table that evening could read it.)

I’m not making any of this up. I’m actually toning it down—by skipping over the embarrassing sconcing rituals. I’ve probably already said too much. These matters are rarely discussed publicly.

All this was, of course, far more ridiculous than anything in that Laurel and Hardy movie.

But now let me talk about the education at Oxford. It was the most old-fashioned thing about the joint.

I laughed at it back then. But now I think it needs to come back into style—because the Oxford system would put a total halt to AI cheating.

Chat GPT would flunk out in disgrace (or, as they described it at Oxford, get sent down). Claude and Grok and all those other bots would wear dunce caps and sit in the corner. Large Language Model (LLM) would get sconced, and deservedly so—I would reject their appeals in every language, large or small.

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How would the Oxford system kill AI?

Once again, where do I begin?

There were so many oddities in Oxford education. Medical students complained to me that they were forced to draw every organ in the human body. I came here to be a doctor, not a bloody artist.

When they griped to their teachers, they were given the usual response: This is how we’ve always done things.

I knew a woman who wanted to study modern drama, but she was forced to decipher handwriting from 13th century manuscripts as preparatory training.

This is how we’ve always done things.

Americans who studied modern history were dismayed to learn that the modern world at Oxford begins in the year 284 A.D. But I guess that makes sense when you consider that Oxford was founded two centuries before the rise of the Aztec Empire.

My experience was less extreme. But every aspect of it was impervious to automation and digitization—let alone AI (which didn’t exist back then).

“When I got my exam results from the college, the grades were handwritten in ancient Greek characters.”

If implemented today, the Oxford system would totally elminate AI cheating—in these five ways:

(1) EVERYTHING WAS HANDWRITTEN—WE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE TYPEWRITERS.

All my high school term papers were typewritten—that was a requirement. And when I attended Stanford, I brought a Smith-Corona electric typewriter with me from home. I used it constantly. Even in those pre-computer days, we relied on machines at every stage of an American education.

When I returned from Oxford to attend Stanford Business School, computers were beginning to intrude on education. I was even forced (unwillingly) to learn computer programming as a requirement for entering the MBA program.

But during my time at Oxford, I never owned a typewriter. I never touched a typewriter. I never even saw a typewriter. Every paper, every exam answer, every text whatsoever was handwritten—and for exams, they were handwritten under the supervision of proctors.

When I got my exam results from the college, the grades were handwritten in ancient Greek characters. (I’m not making this up.)

Even if ChatGPT had existed back then, you couldn’t have relied on it in these settings.

(2) MY PROFESSORS TAUGHT ME AT TUTORIALS IN THEIR OFFICES. THEY WOULD GRILL ME VERBALLY—AND I WAS EXPECTED TO HAVE IMMEDIATE RESPONSES TO ALL THEIR QUESTIONS.

The Oxford education is based on the tutorial system. It’s a conversation in the don’s office. This was often one-on-one. Sometimes two students would share a tutorial with a single tutor. But I never had a tutorial with more than three people in the room.

I was expected to show up with a handwritten essay. But I wouldn’t hand it in for grading—I read it aloud in front of the scholar. He would constantly interrupt me with questions, and I was expected to have smart answers.

When I finished reading my paper, he would have more follow-up questions. The whole process resembled a police interrogation from a BBC crime show.

There’s no way to cheat in this setting. You either back up what you’re saying on the spot—or you look like a fool. Hey, that’s just like real life.

(3) ACADEMIC RESULTS WERE BASED ENTIRELY ON HANDWRITTEN AND ORAL EXAMS. YOU EITHER PASSED OR FAILED—AND MANY FAILED.

The Oxford system was brutal. Your future depended on your performance at grueling multi-day examinations. Everything was handwritten or oral, all done in a totally contained and supervised environment.

Cheating was impossible. And behind-the-scenes influence peddling was prevented—my exams were judged anonymously by professors who weren’t my tutors. They didn’t know anything about me, except what was written in the exam booklets.

I did well and thus got exempted from the dreaded viva voce—the intense oral exam that (for many students) serves as follow-up to the written exams.

That was a relief, because the viva voce is even less susceptible to bluffing or games-playing than tutorials. You are now defending yourself in front of a panel of esteemed scholars, and they love tightening the screws on poorly prepared students.

(4) THE SYSTEM WAS TOUGH AND UNFORGIVING—BUT THIS WAS INTENTIONAL. OTHERWISE THE CREDENTIAL GOT DEVALUED.

I was shocked at how many smart Oxford students left without earning a degree. This was a huge change from my experience in the US—where faculty and administration do a lot of hand-holding and forgiving in order to boost graduation rates.

There were no participation trophies at Oxford. You sank or swam—and it was easy to sink.

That’s why many well-known people—I won’t name names, but some are world famous—can tell you that they studied at Oxford, but they can’t claim that they got a degree at Oxford. Even elite Rhodes Scholars fail the exams, or fear them so much that they leave without taking them.

I feel sorry for my friends who didn’t fare well in this system. But in a world of rampant AI cheating, this kind of bullet-proof credentialing will return by necessity—or the credentials will get devalued.

(5) EVEN THE INFORMAL WAYS OF BUILDING YOUR REPUTATION WERE DONE FACE-TO-FACE—WITH NO TECHNOLOGY INVOLVED

Exams weren’t the only way to build a reputation at Oxford. I also saw people rise in stature because of their conversational or debating or politicking or interpersonal skills.

I’ve never been anywhere in my life where so much depended on your ability at informal speaking. You could actually gain renown by your witty and intelligent dinner conversation. Even better, if you had solid public speaking skills you could flourish at the Oxford Union—and maybe end up as Prime Minister some day.

All of this was done face-to-face. Even if a time traveler had given you a smartphone with a chatbot, you would never have been able to use it. You had to think on your feet, and deliver the goods with lots of people watching.

Maybe that’s not for everybody. But the people who survived and flourished in this environment were impressive individuals who, even at a young age, were already battle tested.

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Back in the day, I often made jokes about this traditional style of education. I learned a tremendous amount at Oxford, but it didn’t seem feasible to replicate it in the United States.

For a start, professors in the US would refuse to spend so much time face-to-face with students. They would complain that the Oxford approach is too labor intensive, too demanding on their precious time.

But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done.

For a start, US colleges could replace their bloated administrative bureaucracies with more teachers. If they did that, there would be plenty of tutors, and every student could receive this individualized attention.

If the leaders are bold enough, you really could create a more personalized system of college education anywhere. Everything could be done in a social context, face-to-face, and no digital interfaces (or chicanery) involved.

I think it’s a superior system. And I speak from firsthand experience.

Maybe you disagree. But I don’t see how anyone could dispute that this method of teaching is immune to AI cheating—or dumbing-down of any sort. Given the collapse in educational integrity happening right now, that is no small advantage.