The phrase “society of cheats” comes from this recent headline at the Atlantic. The author of this story teaches a class on ethics at both Harvard and the University of Chicago. He was writing primarily about the campus environment but it’s not hard to see what that environment will produce for society as a whole if the cheating continues.
Recently, I have taken to telling friends that whenever I’m on campus, I feel like I’m trapped in the middle of a crime spree. I’m not talking about an epidemic of overdue library books or out-of-control parties. I’m talking about AI and the ways in which students are constantly using it to cheat on any work that is assigned to them…
By now, there have been many articles about how undergraduates’ promiscuous use of AI will affect their intellectual development, but I’m far more interested in its moral consequences. This is partly because I’m pretty confident about the former—I’ve told graduate students who actually learned how to write papers in college that I anticipate a generation of incompetents roughly a decade behind them—but also because I teach classes in leadership and business ethics, and I’m aghast at so many young people seemingly habituating themselves to cheating as a way of life…
Students are spending a lot of time learning to be thieves nowadays, and once they receive their dubious diplomas, they will enter the “real world” with all the qualities of a criminal syndicate: a knack for cutting corners, a disdain for community rules, and an assumption that a spirit of integrity, and the sacrifices it assumes, is the reserve of suckers and wimps. We will be a society of cheats.
The author goes on to say that there’s a pretty clear reason why students cheat: They almost always get away with it.
At least part of the reason for this pervasive use of AI appears to be well-founded confidence that cheaters will not get caught, and that if they do, the consequences will be minimal. Take, again, the Harvard survey I mentioned. Among those 2026 graduates who admitted to “using AI for an assignment against instructor permission,” 93 percent of them said their cheating went undiscovered. Of the remaining students, more than half of them said they faced no disciplinary consequences even after they were caught. Just 2.6 percent of these students who used AI “against instructor permission” said they paid any price for their offenses—which, on the whole, is pretty good odds for anyone who is tempted to cheat.
For those inclined to break the rules, “playing the odds” is hardly an unusual strategy. It’s the corrupt cost-benefit analysis of fare evaders, speeding drivers, and tax cheats. It treats community rules not as common obligations but as opportunities for risk assessment. In the face of some illicit benefit, the question is not one of right and wrong, but of the likelihood of punishment.
Last week, a psychologist at the Wharton School wrote about one of his attempts to head off rampant cheating by his students.
The day before a take-home exam in my undergraduate course at Wharton, a few students sent me frantic messages that some of their peers were planning to use artificial intelligence to cheat. Having spent the semester trying to bring out the best in each of them, I was dismayed to discover the worst in them. It felt like a betrayal.
When the 95 students logged in for the exam, however, they got a surprise. I’d ditched the multiple-choice and short-answer questions I usually include. Instead I asked the students to write an essay, using the principles of organizational psychology they’d been studying, on how to motivate students to stop cheating.
Their responses shocked me. Hardly any students saw cheating as a violation of integrity. A majority made excuses: We’re under a lot of stress. Everyone else is doing it. We have no choice. They sounded like major league baseball players in the steroid era. ChatGPT was their performance-enhancing drug.
In the not so distant past, students were ashamed of this behavior. Now it’s just expected and, as mentioned, they don’t really expect there to be any consequences.
In the past, research showed that students who cheated felt guilty about it. It was a last resort stigmatized enough that many wouldn’t admit doing it. To estimate how common it was, researchers had to ask students about the rate of cheating in their class or run anonymous polls. Last year when I surveyed students at elite universities about their views of cheating, plenty of them admitted to doing it to get into college, and they signed the survey using their full names.
Meanwhile, the tools for cheating keep getting better and better. MIT, which is not an easy curriculum, said recently that AI could do just about any assignment given to undergrads.
In a new report published by the university’s ad hoc AI committee, which is co-chaired by professors Eric Klopfer and Samuel Madden, the educators describe the “profound challenges” that AI is already causing…
AI “can produce credible solutions and provide reasonable responses to almost any written assignment in our undergraduate curriculum,” the report stated, “including essays, math and science problems, proofs, and coding assignments.”
It’s actually worse than that makes it sound. Last month the NY Times reported that AI agents were taking entire classes for some students taking entirely online classes.
A.I. agents have made it possible for students to outsource a semester of work. With simple commands — “log in and complete my quiz” — a student can unleash what is, essentially, an imitation of themselves. Agents can watch lecture videos, take tests, write papers and chat with classmates about reading assignments…
Kathryn Kysar has taught community college since the 1980s. Lately, she has seen students perform abysmally on an initial assessment of punctuation skills but soon after submit sterling work studded with colons, semicolons and dashes.
“It’s just so obvious,” said Ms. Kysar, who has facilitated online courses for about 15 years and blames regulatory and leadership failures for higher education’s troubles with A.I. misuse. “Those of us who have been teaching for a long time and are editors and writers can usually recognize the cheaply written A.I. stuff within 30 seconds.”
Professors can monitor whether submitted work was typed in one letter at a time or whether entire paragraphs were all dumped at once. But of course there’s an AI workaround for that too. You just tell the AI to slowly dribble out the answer and it looks, from the professor’s side of things, as if someone was really typing.
Getting back to the big picture, training millions of kids that cheating is a) normal and b) never meets with consequences is going to create a society that sees every barrier as unfair and creates more problems down the line. Just imagine having a doctor who cheated through his classes or a lawyer.
This is the mindset that young people across the country are graduating with, one less of strident careerism than of soft criminality. Relative to those who came before them, they will know very little, but they will be convinced of the wrong things, that the world will get along just fine without integrity in one’s work, trust in one’s peers, and pride in one’s community. These are all achievements, things you earn individually and together. You cannot steal them, but they can be taken from you—and they are being taken from all of us, faster than we know.
Right now, most of the kids in your local high school are cheating. Some of them will cheat their way into college and then cheat their way through college. In a few more years, the world is going to be a very different place full of people who know nothing, do nothing and expect everything be handed to them anyway.
Editor’s Note: President Trump is fighting to ensure America’s kids get the education they deserve.
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