Fellow Augmented Educators,
Welcome to week two of ‘The Detection Deception’ book serialization. New chapters appear here for paid subscribers each Saturday.
This week's installment, 'A History of Academic Dishonesty,' reveals how we arrived at today's assessment crisis. Where last week’s Chapter 1 showed why AI detection fails, Chapter 2 uncovers the deeper structural vulnerabilities that made such failure inevitable.
See you in the comments.
Michael G Wagner (The Augmented Educator)
Chapter 2: A History of Academic Dishonesty
The relationship between education and cheating has always been uncomfortable to examine, perhaps because it forces us to confront fundamental questions about trust, learning, and the systems we've built to measure human knowledge. This discomfort has only intensified as technology transforms not just how students cheat, but what cheating itself means. When a student can generate a complete essay in seconds using artificial intelligence, we face more than a crisis of academic integrity. We confront the possibility that our basic assumptions about teaching, learning, and assessment may no longer hold.
The following exploration traces how we arrived at this moment of reckoning. It examines the historical vulnerabilities in our assessment systems that made them susceptible to disruption, the successive waves of technology that exposed these weaknesses, and the current collapse of traditional academic evaluation in the face of generative AI. This is not simply a story about students behaving badly or technology run amok. It is about an educational infrastructure built on foundations that were always more fragile than we cared to admit, and what happens when those foundations finally give way.