What is the Point of Education If Everyone is Cheating?

Artificial intelligence is only 3 1/2 years old but it has already disrupted at least two major industries: Computer coding and education. The former is pretty ironic given that most of the people likely to lose coding jobs are from the same industry as the people who created large language models like ChatGPT. But the latter is probably the one that is changing the most. 

I’ve written quite a few posts about this topic already because there is a steady stream of alarmed academics who see their entire industry falling apart all around them. In the past week the Chronicle of Higher Education has published two new opinion pieces about the trend. One points out that, thanks to a combination of AI and cell phones, incoming college students struggle to read anything longer than a few pages.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing…

The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Students who struggle to read will also struggle to write. Luckily for them, AI is here to do the heavy lifting. 

Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.

AI is essentially masking a decline in basic capability in two of the three R’s in education, reading and writing.

The second article published this week is about the use of AI more generally and how it is corrupting all of the work done by students and also by professors themselves.

Universities run on what we might call “integrity tasks”: little pieces of work that are expected to be done honestly, by a person, but with minimal policing and oversight. When a student is asked to write a paper, that’s an integrity task, the expectation being that they do the work themselves and do not plagiarize. When a journal asks for peer review of an article, the expectation is that the professor reads the article themselves and writes a thoughtful, thorough letter. When a department chair asks a full professor for a tenure evaluation, that professor is expected to spend one or two days reading the candidate’s work, and then to write a lengthy 3-5 page letter assessing the quality…

AI introduces a gigantic moral hazard in that it substantially reduces the time it takes to complete these things, if the person is willing to let an large language model do it for them. For students, an essay that would have taken away a beautiful Sunday afternoon can be completed in minutes. Worried about being caught? Run it through AIHumanize, which will take your AI-written essay, and then use AI to make it sound more human. For only $10 a month!

Professors are not immune from these temptations. At conferences over the last few months, I’ve heard the full range of bad-behavior stories already. Anthropic recently released data from a study of over 74,000 educator conversations with Claude. A full 7 percent of those conversations involved the educator using AI to do grading or student assessment in some way, and “when they did, 48.9 percent of the time they used it in an automation-heavy way (where the AI directly performs the task).” Similar practices are creeping into peer review.

AI offers everyone involved in education a shortcut and many, many people are taking it. The honor codes of yore are not prevailing over the base impulse to short-circuit the work now that there is a much less risky option for doing so. 

And it’s worth mentioning that while most of the public complaints about all of this come from university professors, that’s only because university professors have access to major news outlets to complain about it. Talk to any high school teacher these days (or any student) and you’ll find it’s just as widespread there. I suspect middle school isn’t much better.

I have a friend who teaches at a Quaker high school in Philadelphia, and he told me that it’s become standard for students to write their essays in Google Docs because they can be monitored by the instructor, who can then see if large pieces of text have been pasted in. Students could still theoretically cheat — they would just have to use their phones to generate their essays, and then type it in themselves on their laptop, letter by letter. Not too hard, really, just annoying. And at some point, a smart 22-year-old will probably vibe code a workaround.

The really disturbing part of this is that it puts the honest students under constant, unfair pressure to keep up with the ones who are cheating. The actual high-achievers welcome efforts to keep the cheaters from succeeding without doing the work.

Gone are the take-home exams, back are the in person, blue book finals. Some faculty are doing oral exams for their smaller classes. This feels to me like a stopgap solution, though students appear to be on board. I heard from many that they actually appreciated the return to in-person exams, cramping hands aside, because it kept the playing field level and reduced the possibility of cheating. At my university, take-home exams appear to be on their way to extinction, with only 49 administered this semester, down from 168 a year before.

The author goes on to point out that, even at the highest level, where professors exist not to teach undergrads but to produce new research, AI threatens to overwhelm the system with a flood of machine-written papers that only machines will have time to sort through.

The piece ends with a kind of flourish of hope that seems disconnected from the rest of what he’s presenting to the reader. What advantage do human educators have at this point? Only that they have real life experiences outside the central focus of the knowledge being transmitted in classrooms. They can, he suggests, have lunch with students and talk to them casually in a way that AI can’t. 

Granted, AI hasn’t caught up in the casual socializing department quite yet, though it probably will win there too in a few years. But that’s hardly a justification for students paying $50k a year to attend a school or for universities paying six-figure salaries to tenured professors whose job can be replaced or managed by one person utilizing AI teaching and research agents. Put another way, if the only thing that can’t be replaced (yet) is socializing over a lunch break, our education system is doomed.

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