Johns Hopkins professor says he can detect AI cheating as schools crack down on student use

As schools grapple with AI cheating, Johns Hopkins professor Steve Hanke argues chatbot-generated work is easily detectable due to poor student writing. Meanwhile, schools are reverting to oral and handwritten exams as AI detectors show false-negative rates up to 99.6%. In Australia, state policies diverge: New South Wales proposed banning unsupervised take-home assignments after 1,000 cheating cases in 2025, while South Australia rolled out its own classroom AI tool, EdChat.

AI cheating detection methods

• ▪Steve Hanke, an applied economics professor at Johns Hopkins University, stated he can easily detect AI-generated student work because of students' poor writing skills and his familiarity with their economics knowledge.
• ▪Harvard University professors are increasingly using oral and pen-and-paper exams to prevent students from cheating with AI chatbots.
• ▪Some educators are redesigning assignments to be AI-resistant and returning to handwritten assignments to discourage students from using chatbots.
• ▪Drusilla Blackman, former dean of admissions at Harvard University and Columbia University, stated that educators can easily detect AI use because submitted work often does not match a student's typical writing standard.

State-level AI policy divergence

• ▪Australian state education departments have adopted differing, localized approaches to manage AI-enabled cheating in schools rather than following a single national standard.
• ▪The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority sets academic integrity standards requiring students to submit their own work, leaving individual schools to adjudicate suspected AI cheating cases.
• ▪The Tasmanian Department for Education, Children and Young People has blocked AI applications and websites for students on department-owned devices and networks.
• ▪The Queensland Department of Education and the Queensland Curriculum Assessment Authority require senior students to complete an academic integrity course to address AI and digital tool usage.

NSW HSC assignment reforms

• ▪The New South Wales government proposed banning unsupervised take-home assignments for year 11 and 12 students to combat AI-enabled cheating on the Higher School Certificate.
• ▪Under the New South Wales Education Standards Authority policy, students must complete a learning unit called All My Own Work before taking Higher School Certificate courses.
• ▪The New South Wales proposal to ban unsupervised take-home assignments was prompted by more than 1,000 recorded cheating cases in 2025.

South Australia EdChat rollout

• ▪The South Australian state government announced a royal commission into artificial intelligence commencing in October 2026.
• ▪South Australia partnered with Microsoft to develop and roll out EdChat, a custom, secure ChatGPT-style generative AI tool for public high schools.

AI detection tool limitations

• ▪Companies such as Superhuman, which owns Grammarly, and GPTZero sell both AI detection tools and tools that generate or rewrite text to evade detection.
• ▪Jenny Maxwell, who runs education at Superhuman, stated that the race between AI detection and evasion is a dead end.
• ▪University of Florida researchers tested five popular AI text detectors and found false-negative rates as high as 99.6 percent.
• ▪TikTok and YouTube feature tutorials selling humanisers that rewrite AI text and autotypers that fake real-time typing sessions to defeat AI detection software.