These teachers fight AI cheating with classes that force students to show they are learning

illuminem summarises for you the essential news of the day, reviewed by our editorial team. Read the full piece on The Washington Post or enjoy below:

🗞️ Driving the news: Educators across the US are abandoning AI detection in favour of redesigned assessment, a dozen teachers and professors told The Post
• At the University of Baltimore, writing programme director Rachael Zeleny rebuilt the advanced writing curriculum to produce a record of the learning process rather than a final artefact
• Students now submit chatbot conversation transcripts, handwritten outlines and video reflections
• Assignments include debating instructor-designed chatbots in a simulated school board meeting

🔭 The context: Zeleny had previously recommended Brisk, an app tracking student activity in Google Docs and replaying document revisions surveillance she described as a stopgap rather than a solution
• New York temporarily banned generative AI below high school last week as Los Angeles Unified banned it on school-issued devices
• Meanwhile OpenAI and Anthropic offer free access to K-12 teachers and districts, Perplexity discounts students, and Google has enabled Gemini through Classroom
• Smaller firms sell detectors to teachers while pitching students "humanizers" designed to defeat revision tracking.

🌍 Why it matters for corporate governance and sustainability: The exchange between schools and AI companies marks where responsibility currently sits, with the institutions absorbing the disruption, not the firms distributing the tools.
• Vendor incentives seeemingly run against institutional interests on both sides of the transaction
• The same market supplies detection tools to schools and evasion tools to students
• Anna Mills of College of Marin wants developers to make AI agents refuse logins to school software or identify themselves so institutions can set rules
• Perplexity spokesperson Beejoli Shah said such measures would compromise student security and safety, a trade-off the company would not make

⏭️ What's next: Mills warns that agents capable of logging into learning systems and completing entire courses are poorly understood by teachers. Districts continue developing policy while individual educators improvise — Oakland teacher Hannah Scharlin-Pettee described the situation as DIY, building her own AI literacy unit on a small departmental stipend.

💬 One quote: "The big worry now is not if they're using AI. The big worry is if they're still learning" — Andrew Zeiser, supply chain management professor, John Carroll University.

📈 One stat: The article carries no quantitative figure; its evidence is the accounts of a dozen educators.

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