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. Not the overdue library books or out-of-control parties kind - I'm talking about AI and the way students are constantly using it to cheat on any work assigned to them.
For those of us in higher ed - and I've taught at universities for more than 20 years - such widespread cheating is a baffling predicament. Universities are medieval creations, encrusted with eccentric customs, antique bureaucracies, and hierarchical privileges; any significant change typically comes about at a glacial pace. Not too long ago, I was still filling out grades in triplicate. The arrival of AI is like a tribe of Neanderthals discovering a flying saucer hovering outside their cave. To say we were unprepared doesn't begin to describe the experience.
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. 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 leadership and business ethics, and I'm aghast at so many young people seemingly habituating themselves to cheating as a way of life.
Many students would no doubt object, but plainly that's what they're doing: cheating their way through their education. Every paper they don't write, every problem set they don't prepare, every serious reading they summarize into a memo - all exercises in cutting corners, in getting by, and, at graduation time, in gaining a degree they didn't earn.
That word is key: earn. To say someone 'earned' something applies a moral distinction to what one acquires. Not only can we get things we didn't earn, but we can also obtain things we don't deserve. The first is the good fortune of the trust-fund kid, the second the province of a thief.
Students are spending a lot of time learning to be thieves nowadays, and once they receive their dubious diplomas, they'll 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 integrity, and the sacrifices it assumes, is the reserve of suckers and wimps. We will be a society of cheats.
I began to notice the change in the winter of 2023, when some writing assignments for my classes at Harvard and the University of Chicago took on qualities I had never seen before: squeaky-clean grammar, a superabundance of bullet points, and robotic reiteration of facts rather than the pleasing lurch of original thinking.
This is the horrid house style of AI-generated papers; initially, it was the clumsiness that made them easy to dismiss, but no longer. A spring survey by The Harvard Crimson found that one-third of the graduating class admitted to 'using AI for an assignment against instructor permission' - a sanitized way of saying 'using AI to cheat.'
That survey was of students who entered college in the fall of 2022, before mass adoption of AI tools. For students arriving this semester, I keep thinking about a colleague who teaches freshman composition at the University of Chicago. In the spring, he told me that across all sections he led over the past year, he believed only three of his students submitted assignments written without AI help. Three students in a class whose explicit aim is to teach writing.
At least part of the reason for this pervasive use of AI appears to be well-founded confidence that cheaters won't get caught, and if they do, consequences will be minimal. Among the 2026 graduates who admitted to cheating, 93 percent said their cheating went undiscovered. Of the remaining, more than half faced no disciplinary consequences. Just 2.6 percent paid any price - pretty good odds for anyone tempted to cheat.
For those inclined to break rules, 'playing the odds' is hardly unusual. It's the corrupt cost-benefit analysis of fare evaders, speeding drivers, and tax cheats. It treats community rules not as obligations but as opportunities for risk assessment. The question becomes not right or wrong, but likelihood of punishment.
Such thinking is especially seductive for 'victimless crimes' - a hazardous oxymoron. To would-be offenders, the moral appeal can be powerful when harm is remote or uncertain. They know the good they'd enjoy, so it seems unjust to deny themselves when no serious harm comes to others.
My hunch is this is how many students see unsanctioned AI use. No real damage comes to others when they use these tools. And in a world where everyone's doing it - even some professors - why put themselves at a disadvantage?
Of course, such logic already accepts one kind of harm: a debasement of the academic experience. A recent case out of Brown University provides a bleak illustration. In the spring, economics professor Roberto Serrano changed his exam format from in-person to take-home - a generous concession to student anxiety after the mass shooting on campus in December. How did students respond? Enrollment soared. Nearly 90 students signed up for a class that had never had more than 30 before, and the average midterm score was 96, with 40 students 'achieving' a perfect score.
One doesn't need a tenured economist to know this is improbable. As Serrano told Insider Higher Ed, he ran his exam through ChatGPT and got answers similar to his impeccable pupils - 'kind of correct,' but with 'a very convoluted style.' So for the final, he switched back to in-person. Eighteen students immediately dropped. Nine who remained didn't take the exam at all. Among those who did, the average score was 48.6 - the lowest in the class's history by nearly 20 points.
Serrano was understandably sore. 'We cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is OK,' he told Inside Higher Ed. 'That leads to a declining society, to a failed society.' The specific failure he had in mind is intellectual - 'We cannot choose to become idiots' - but the episode encapsulates the moral rot when members of a community stop regarding rules as obligatory.
Set aside the offenders. For students who care about a subject, they know they're surrounded by cheating peers. For professors excited to communicate new ways of thinking, they face a wall of young people who won't make the barest effort. For graduate teaching assistants, they spend hours grading bogus assignments, then face giving out underserved A's.
This is the upshot of the crime spree under way at campuses across the country and around the world. It doesn't involve the same type of harm as spiking the water supply or setting a building on fire - harm immediate, overwhelming, undeniable - but in the long term, it's no less destructive. It entirely corrupts the integrity of an academic community, because learning in a classroom is impossible when everyone knows the proceedings are ridiculous.
Glacial though they may be, universities are starting to respond. As The Atlantic's Rose Horowitch reported in the spring, Princeton's faculty voted to mandate proctors for all in-person examinations. This is the most significant change to the university's famed Honor Code since it was first introduced in 1893, when the young men of Princeton successfully contended that their word alone should suffice. For over 130 years, students have had to attest: 'I pledge my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this examination.' Henceforward, they'll still be asked, but it will be merely a formality. The faculty has decided students simply cannot be trusted.
This is how communities respond to crime waves: They beef up law enforcement. Surveillance widens, punishments stiffen, and legal codes expand to police behavior formerly restrained by customary norms of honor, decorum, and mutual reciprocity. As superintendents of their academic communities, faculty find themselves prioritizing disciplinary elements of their job. They'll spend more time as judge, jury, and executioner, even when what they really want to do is research and teach.
A suboptimal allocation of academic resources may be the least we have to fear. Even if faculty can curb this wave - count me doubtful - it's the result of an unprecedented number of students deciding they don't need to follow rules that disadvantage their own success, regardless of implications for peers and community.
This is the mindset young people are graduating with, one less of strident careerism than of soft criminality. Relative to those before them, they'll know very little, but they'll 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.