I hate the feeling as it creeps up in my chest. I am reading a paper, and something about it just feels off. It doesn’t quite fit the assignment, but it sounds really smart. I start to focus in and ask more questions. How would the student be able to make the kind of summative claims they are making here about this author’s work after one reading in class? Why are they talking about complex political theory that we haven’t engaged in a class on spirituality? What began as an embodied intuition becomes a conscious question: is this my student’s work?
It’s not. It rarely is when I begin to feel that way. I put the sentence into a search engine and discover it is lifted off the internet, or that it’s from a source the student maybe cites broadly at the end of the paragraph—but in fact, the whole paragraph is more or less a direct quote that is uncited. This submission does not represent their meaningful engagement with the materials for the assignment. They have “researched” and shared what they found, but they’ve bypassed the part where they integrate it, think about it, express it in their own thoughts and form. It closely resembles an AI-generated response to the assignment prompt I find through a simple Google search.
My immediate response is frustration and anger. The shortcut that this student took now becomes a couple of painful hours of work for me: documenting the problem with the paper and notifying the dean, deciding how to respond within the class, and meeting with the student to explain the problem—knowing that nine times out of ten, they were overwhelmed with life and their present work of ministry. They were just trying to get something submitted so they wouldn’t waste their tuition money for the class by failing it—money that is often borrowed in student loans that can disappear if they fail to make progress in the class. There are tearful conversations, confessions of struggle, moments of honest connection. And yet, all of that feels like unnecessary work, often at the end of the term when I am already struggling to respond to everything that comes in quickly but faithfully. I wonder if it’s worth doing at all.
In this day of AI and cut-and-paste, with students trying to work a full-time job, provide care for partners, children, and parents, and somehow squeeze in a complex professional degree on the side, these shortcuts happen more regularly. They apparently happen at the highest level of government reports, as the AI-fabricated studies released in a report from Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., recently demonstrated. More comically, I’ve even had it happen in an “autobiography of my adolescence” assignment.
Intellectually, I know that this decision to take the shortcut—to just get something turned in—isn’t personal. But I still feel betrayed every time. To have doubts, to double-check, and then discover my suspicions were correct feels like a violation of the trust I place in my students. I struggle to return to other students’ work; the whole exercise feels cheapened. I wonder how many others may have done the same thing more cleverly, in ways I haven’t caught.
Later, I wonder if the fault was somehow my own. Maybe they didn’t feel like I was engaging their work seriously enough in the online environment, and it all felt transactional to them. Maybe the way we deal with information and intellectual property is simply changing, and I need to let it go and accept the practice of representing another’s work as one’s own. Maybe the assignment edged too much toward something that didn’t require their integration of learning and experience—something that felt like busywork to them. Maybe I need to be smarter about how I design and teach the course, to somehow give more relationally so they feel responsible to their learning in a different way. Maybe this whole venture of remote theological education with busy adults is just about credentialing and not about transformational learning—and my decade of giving so much energy to it a fool’s errand.
Every time, I go through the same exhausting loop. The emotional toll of caring about this work we do with students can be a lot. Sometimes I can shake it off. Sometimes I make some changes to the assignment, girding against future betrayals. Sometimes I’m just grateful that it’s summer, and I don’t have to respond to student work for a while—knowing I will likely have more equanimity about it all when I’m more rested.
But my goodness, what a ride.
About Katherine Turpin
Dr. Katherine Turpin is Professor of Practical Theology and Religious Education at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, CO, where she also serves as Director of the MDiv program. Her current research and teaching interests include the relationship between education and social change; teaching in digital environments; and unlearning white supremacy.