A MOVIE OF MINUSCULE IMPACT

Marvel had a tall order for AntMan: Quantumania. They needed to tie it into a film from five years ago, break the bad reputation they’ve gained with critics and introduce the villain for the next Avengers movie. They didn’t do too poorly at these goals. The movie was profitable and received well by fans. However, it failed at the fundamental levels of growing the main characters in the film and being an original movie

Ant-Man: Quantumainia’s strongest trait was its villain. As the saying goes, “a hero is only as good as their villain,” and this movie had a great introduction to one. However, that’s all it was -- an introduction. The film focused so much on introducing Kang as the next villain now that Thanos is gone that it lost its ability to tell a story on its own. In the end, the characters learn nothing, and their situation remains the same as it was at the beginning. Kang was also created not as an Ant-Man villain, but as an Avengers villain. The dark tone set by such a powerful villain as Kang clashed with the upbeat family tone of the other two Ant-Man movies. Quantumania’s tone problem required the characters to make nonsensical decisions for the sake of the plot and caused “tonal whiplash.” This weakened the immersion of the movie and undercut Kang’s power. The film also had all of the typical failings of Marvel movies: overuse of CGI, rapid cuts, a literally faceless army the heroes can kill without the audience feeling bad and the inevitable contradictions with other films in the franchise.

Despite all of this, altogether the movie was somewhat enjoyable. It wasn’t what I was expecting, wasn’t original and was nowhere near as good as their recent hits with Werewolf by Night and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. I, personally, am excited to see what Marvel will come up with next. However, I don’t know how long that will last if Marvel doesn’t get their act together.

by Aidan Brown

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to transform the field of education, concerns are growing about the potential for AI to facilitate academic dishonesty. With AI’s ability to generate text, provide automated responses and even complete assignments on behalf of students, it has created new avenues for cheating and plagiarism. This has led to a pressing need for new approaches to address the intersection of academic dishonesty and AI.

The above paragraph was written by ChatGPT, one primary example of a website dedicated to helping students on their assignments through AI. ChatGPT, according to ZDnet, is a “natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that allows [someone] to have human-like conversations and much more with a chatbot. The language model can answer questions, and assist [someone] with tasks such as composing emails, essays, and code.”

Whether an assignment was actually completed by a student or is misrepresented as someone or something else’s work is a dilemma teachers have to consider when grading homework, quizzes, tests and essays. According to ProctorEDU, advancement of technology in the past few decades has allowed cheating— whether through artificial intelligence (AI) or other classmates—to skyrocket. Even though the available tools and methods are always evolving and developing, the baseline issue has not changed: not all students are academically honest. Cheating, as defined by Merriam Webster, is when one violates rules dishonestly. In all its different forms, it is a constant challenge teachers face.

There are numerous factors that can motivate students to cheat on homework, quizzes, tests, projects or other assignments. Social studies teacher Chad Russell considers an active lifestyle one of the major causes of such offenses.

“I think kids are probably busier today than they’ve ever been before with extracurriculars, sports, work and family situations,” Russell said. “We’re just always, always busy. And so the time demands I think probably push students to look for those easy ways out, those shortcuts, those ways to cut down on time.”

In classes that place emphasis on student cooperation, such as those of English teacher Kelley Culp, teachers often must be stricter when defining the boundaries between individual work and collaboration.

“We do a lot of group work in my classes, and because of that I often encourage people to collaborate and do things together,” Culp said. “I have to be very very specific when there’s an assignment that I want students to do completely on their own, so when I say to my students ‘This work should be without the help of a book with only your own brain, and without the help of other people,’ most of the time my students understand that means don’t use anything else.”

Every teacher differs in their teaching styles and approaches to limit cheating. When Russell is able to detect similarities between individual students’ work, he discusses the issue with the whole class to discourage future occurrences.

“When I see [cheating], it’s pretty easy to catch,” Russell said. “A lot of times if I see it happening more and more, like kids sharing answers with one another and copying verbatim, then I’ll try to address it in the entire class so everybody is aware that yes, I do see it. You’re not fooling anybody.”

60% of respondents have cheated on an assignment

62% of respondents know what artificial intelligence (AI) is

While some teachers decide to address the problem after it has already happened, Physics teacher Kyle Hagner builds prevention against academic dishonesty into his grading and assessment system.

70% of respondents have allowed someone to cheat off of them

@cnhsmedia Instagram poll

“For quizzes, I have multiple versions that are superficially similar to discourage cheating,” Hagner said. “I think the best

/CHēt-iNG/ verb homework and classwork is to make the student’s grade heavily dependent on quizzes. This gives students more incentive to use classwork as an opportunity to learn the material, which they cannot accomplish by cheating.”

While teachers can take countless precautions against cheating, sometimes it simply isn’t possible to catch every instance. The habit of sharing answers and other forms of academic dishonesty can become a larger issue when students don’t actually interact with the course materials. Russell explains how this type of cheating has a ripple effect in students’ academic and life trajectories.

“One of the things that concerns me the most about ChatGPT is [that] when students will rely on that, they’re not gaining the analytical skills they need for success in future classes or in the job market,” Russell said.

"You need to think creatively, analytically, you need to be able to write, and when something else is doing it for you, you’re kind of cheating yourself of the opportunity to learn how to do that well.”

Abuse of the wide variety of tools and technology available to students today might simplify work in the short term, but it can lead to much more significant issues in the long term. However, under the right conditions, resources like ChatGPT can be used in a way that is beneficial to learning instead of detrimental.

Computer science and math teacher Mike Spock describes the difference between copying work from another student and using resources available to students.

“You’re here to develop the skills and it’s the effort that you put into it. If someone else or something else is doing your work, you’re not going to develop the skills,” Spock said. “Now there are tools that are useful and if you can learn how to use those tools, awesome. A calculator is an awesome tool. I want my math students to learn how to use it.”

Similarly, senior Computer Science 2 student Ben Richards views ChatGPT and other AI platforms as a means to a more efficient workflow.

“It’s like with a calculator,” Richards said. “In elementary school we couldn’t use a calculator really, we had to do everything by hand. And then once you get into high school, you can do everything with a calculator, and there’s no reason to do it by hand because you have

Ben Richards turn in a completed assignment but you haven’t actually done any of the thinking about it

Kelley Culp when you submit work that is completely not your own work

ChatGPT act of deception, dishonesty, or fraud committed by a person in order to gain an unfair advantage or benefit, especially in an academic setting that tool with you. So I think that’ll be the future. There’s no reason to do what ChatGPT could do for you, or other AIs, because that’s just one of the tools that becomes a normal part of everyday life.”

NPR, an American nonprofit media organization, explains that cheating increased during COVID-19, allowing tools to become very useful during that time. Senior Ritisha Rashmil explains how, besides having constant access to resources like these, COVID-19 helped further result in students having a lack of motivation to do their own work themselves.

“The one thing with COVID is that it made it a lot harder for many people to focus in class, which then resulted in panicked studying, things like ‘oh my I absolutely know nothing about the topic,’” Rashmil said. “So then it results in hey, I have a test online, I can search up the answers and figure it out. And it doesn’t just affect academic-wise, but it can also affect extracurricular competitions and stuff, which also turned online, so I guess it’s more of the distractedness we got being bored at home kind of resulted in academic dishonesty.”

Source: Northern Illinois University

Inaccurate Assessment

Instructors unable to properly assess student performance or students’ mastery of knowledge, skills, and applications

AI can even be used for more than just cheating on a homework assignment. As Spock explains, in the future it is possible to replace humans in the workforce with computers.

“You have to combine computer science with parts of speech, because, you know, the English language is so complex, but people put it together in a good way and it’s a field that’s really been growing because there’s so much value in mundane tasks,” Spock said. “You can allow a computer to be the one to answer [phone calls] for you. I mean so many corporations are having chatbots answer - if a chatbot can answer 50% of the questions, you can pay 50% less people to be the humans on the phone.”

The possibility of a future where AI becomes normalized in society leads some teachers, such as Culp, to find ways to embrace the technology as opposed to fighting it.

“I think fighting things like AI is just a losing battle that would be a ridiculous notion for us,” Culp said. “But embracing it and figuring out how we can benefit from something like ChatGPT is a much better strategy.”

71% of respondents did not feel guilty after cheating

65% of respondents do not think copying homework is cheating

54% of respondents have heard about academic dishonesty at North

Consequences Of Cheating

Students’ Self-Esteem potential future guilt and low self-esteem

Social Effects potential to cheat in other aspects of life; affects all of one’s relationships

Legal Consequences formal actions against school or individual; ruin future opportunities

Practical Concerns reflects poorly on others (such as alumi); lessens employment prospects