[Header Photo by Lauren Mancke on Unsplash]

“Did you write this?” I once asked a sophomore in my advanced English class. The student was one of three siblings I would teach, and their mother was a colleague of mine in our English department.

With students and my own daughter, I have asked questions like that one often, and I always knew the answer. The question was an opportunity for the student to confront what I already knew.

This student, you see, had turned in a cited essay that her older sister had turned in just a few years earlier. I had the paper in my files, and since I immediately recognized it, I had the copy with her sister’s name on the cover page waiting for her reply.

English and writing teachers especially, but all teachers are constantly seeking ways to insure students do their own work.

As long as there have been students, teachers, and formal schooling, however, students have sought ways to pass off writing and reading that they, in fact, had not done.

This student cold-face lied, and I handed her the paper by her sister.

Something like that has occurred several times over my forty-plus years of teaching.

A non-traditional aged woman in a night composition class for a local junior college became enraged when I asked her “Did you write this?”

I had been reading her writing for several weeks, and this essay she submitted wasn’t her work. There was no doubt and no need to prove it.

She became loud and angry, steadfast in her claim the writing was hers. After that night, I never saw her again.

Several years ago in my first-year writing seminar, a basketball player submitted a teammate’s essay from a few semesters earlier. The essay rang a bell, and after a search on my laptop, I found the original essay on my hard drive.

Plagiarism and passing off other people’s work as their own have not been rampant throughout my career, in part because I have implemented reading and writing workshop in courses. Students have been reading and writing in front of me for decades.

Lots of cheating can been avoided by daylight and surveillance.

Part of the workshop approach, as well, stresses for students that the reading and writing processes are acts of learning; further, the emphasis on process helps lessen the importance of the product as a mechanism for acquiring a grade.

“It ought to be unnecessary to say that writing is learned by writing; unfortunately there is need,” wrote Lou LaBrant in 1953. LaBrant then continued and this may sound familiar:

Again and again teachers or schools are accused of failing to teach students to write decent English, and again and again investigations show that students have been taught about punctuation, the function of a paragraph, parts of speech, selection of “vivid” words, spelling—that students have done everything but the writing of many complete papers. Again and again college freshmen report that never in either high school or grammar school have they been asked to select a topic for writing, and write their own ideas about that subject. Some have been given topics for writing; others have been asked to summarize what someone else has said; numbers have been given work on revising sentences, filling in blanks, punctuating sentences, and analyzing what others have written….Knowing facts about language does not necessarily result in ability to use it. (p. 417)

Over the seventy-plus years since LaBrant’s article, students have written original texts far too rarely; in fact, as writers and students in general, students sit in classrooms where the teacher does much of the work the student should be doing as part of learning.

Writing prompts and rubrics have done far more harm to students as writers than any technology work around, but technology has also joined in the fun over those eight decades.

ChatGPT and other forms of AI are the current miracle/crisis forms of technology in education. Seemingly, many people in education, surprisingly, are jumping on the AI bandwagon, much like the coding wave and cellphone bans.

You see, we are trapped in a love/hate binary with technology in education that too often isn’t based in evidence.

Tech and AI products like Grammarly and Turnitin.com have ridden high waves of use despite both products, to be blunt, just being very poor quality. Grammarly gives really bad writing advice, and Turnitin.com is less effective detecting plagiarism than a simple (and free) Google search.

The broader technology problem in education, which parallels the AI problem, is that technology in education is often like a microwave; something can be completed quicker but the product is either hard to stomach or simply ruined.

A recent study, in fact, shows that students using AI to draft tend to produce very similar texts that are shallow at best. Further, students who use AI to compose struggle to recall any of their writing.

Why? Let’s invoke LaBrant again: Writing is learned by writing.

Better worded, we should think of “writing” as composing. Composing is the art of simultaneously creating meaning, developing understanding, and drafting communication in words, sentences, and paragraphs.

AI generating functional text in some real-world contexts may be a time saver, a net positive. But for students, scholars, and writers, using AI at any point of the composing process is a new form of plagiarism.

Let me be clear, this is about the composing process because AI has long been useful for surface editing; grammar and spell check is not cheating, and AI can relieve the writer some of the burden of editing (a role humans often play for other people in the world of writing an publishing).

Maybe AI will prove valuable in many ways for humans, but AI that does for students the very behaviors students must perform to learn is never justified—just as teachers doing the work for students has never been justified.

“As citizens we need to be able to write and to understand the importance and difficulty of being honest and clear. We will learn to do this by doing it,” LaBrant offers bluntly.

“Did you write this?” is an enduring question between teacher and student.

In 2025, using AI is just as damning as putting your name on your sister’s essay before turning it in as your own.

So that’s why you cannot spell “plagiarism” without “AI.”