The French blogger Lionel Dricot (AKA Ploum) has some useful advice for uni teachers who are struggling with plagiarism on tests and assignments–reframe them as learning.
Here is a summing up: let students choose by showing them how to change.
Students use chatbots in their everyday lives so we should teach them to use these tools responsibly in those everyday lives especially in school.
The Problem
Many schools either ban chatbots outright or act as if they don’t exist. Both responses miss the point that:
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Students are already using these tools.
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AI tools are not going away.
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Digital literacy in the workaday world now includes knowing how to work with AI.
Rather than trying to see if a chatbot could pass the test, Ploum’s goal was to help students learn how to use the tools responsibly.
The Experiment: Student Choice
Before the exam, students had to pick one of two options.
Option A – No Chatbots
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Only traditional research methods (like web searches) are allowed.
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Any chatbot use would count as cheating.
Option B – Chatbots Allowed (With Rules)
Students could use a chatbot only if they followed strict rules:
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Transparency: clearly state when information comes from a chatbot.
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Share the exact prompts they used.
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Identify and explain any mistakes in the chatbot’s answers.
Breaking any of those rules would be treated as cheating.
The Accountability Rule
If a student chose to use a chatbot, they were fully responsible for its output.
Chatbot mistakes were penalized more heavily than ordinary human mistakes.Why? Using a powerful tool requires careful judgment and extra verification. In other words, you can use the tool, but you can’t blame it for unchecked errors–you are accountable for what it produces.
What Students Learn
Ploum argues that this approach shifts the focus from banning technology to teaching responsibility and includes these lessons. (They are supposed to learn, right?)
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Be transparent. Show your sources and your process.
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Think critically. AI outputs must be checked and evaluated.
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Don’t outsource thinking. Tools can help, but they don’t replace reasoning.
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Make choices deliberately. Deciding in advance whether to use a tool forces you to think about how you learn.
Why It Matters for Education
This experiment reframes the debate. It’s less about catching students in some punitive ‘gotcha’ game and more about preparing them for a world that already uses all of these powerful tools.
Education should adapt by raising expectations for responsibility and judgment—not by lowering standards.
The Bigger Question
Can we design learning environments where using powerful tools requires even stronger thinking?
Ploum suggests we can. I think so, too. The larger question I ask myself is this: why did I not do this just before I retired I could have made a big difference for my colleagues and learners?
I think we all know why? Change is dangerous and revolutionary change is the most dangerous. The danger is to how we make our bread and butter, to the status quo, to the schema we have already invested so much energy to laying down in our hearts and minds.
File under eating my own “dog food”, i.e. practicing what I preach:
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Transparency: I used ChatGPT
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Prompt used: Turn this post into a one page teaching brief that is readable by a high school student.
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Mistakes or edits: I edited for excessive dumbing down and for unnecessary formatting