Yves here. The finding in this article, that a lot of young people today will ‘fess up to cheating, is disturbing on multiple levels. First, it suggests that many if not most regard school as an exercise in credential, as opposed to skill, acquisition. Second, it creates a criminogenic environment, in that if a student does not cheat, he is competitively disadvantaged. Third, it points to a wide-spread decline in ethics. No wonder the US has dropped in corruption perception rankings. It looks to be well warranted.
By Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College. Originally published at The Conversation
My colleagues and I recently spoke with a group of talented, interesting students who just completed their first year of college about using artificial intelligence as a research tool.
I asked what must have seemed like an unrelated question: “How many of you cheated in high school?”
Most of the students raised their hands. Perhaps comforted by the realization that they had plenty of company, they seemed neither embarrassed nor ashamed.
This is not the first time I’ve asked my students that question. On each occasion, the results have been pretty much the same.
By the time students end up in college classrooms, many have encountered cheating and think it makes sense in some cases to do so, because of factors like pressure to succeed.
Let’s be clear: AI has not created the problem of intellectual dishonesty among this generation of students.
Alas, the problem long predates AI and runs much deeper.
The Cheating Pipeline
Many college students are honest and hardworking. But by the time some students get to college, they have become accustomed to academic misconduct in American high schools.
As Eric Anderman, a scholar of educational psychology, wrote in 2018: “Academic cheating is prevalent throughout all types of American high schools. Data from one large national study indicated that 51% of high school students admit that they have cheated during a test.”
Other research on high school cheating found in 2020 that 64% of 70,000 high school students across the country admitted to cheating on a test, and 58% admitted to plagiarism. Approximately 95% of high school students, meanwhile, said they “participated in some form of cheating, whether it was on a test, plagiarism or copying homework.”
And in one Pennsylvania high school, 90 of the 100 respondents to a 2018 school survey “admitted to cheating on some form of schoolwork at least once.”
One of the respondents put it simply: “Everybody cheats.”
Students can cheat for different reasons.
They might feel unprepared for an exam or paper, but they still want to get good grades and gain admission into a competitive college.
They might recognize that cheating is wrong, but they justify it by saying everyone else is doing the same thing, or that they have teachers who don’t do their jobs well. Other students might not fully understand what cheating means in different contexts or think that what they are doing counts as cheating.
This kind of thinking can allow students who sometimes cheat to not think of themselves as cheaters.
Sociologists Gresham Sykes and David Matza call this tendency “techniques of neutralization.” This means people use their internalized ways of seeing the world to justify acting in a way they know is wrong.
Looking the Other Way
A 2020 study of 840 undergraduate college students found that 32% of them had cheated in some way on an exam.
College professors like me may be tempted to look the other way if we suspect a student is cheating, or try to solve the cheating problem by changing the ways we evaluate students.
The Wall Street Journal, for example, reported in 2025 that faculty across the country are giving up on writing assignments, which students can produce with AI, and returning to in-class tests and examinations.
Every college and university has rules against plagiarism and other forms of intellectual dishonesty.
To offer one example, Harvard’s policy says that “Cheating on exams or problem sets, plagiarizing or misrepresenting the ideas or language of someone else as one’s own, falsifying data, or any other instance of academic dishonesty violates the standards of our community, as well as the standards of the wider world of learning and affairs.”
Students who violate the cheating rules at Harvard and elsewhere might face consequences ranging from failing a class to being expelled. But many instructors don’t report incidents of cheating to administrators responsible for enforcing those rules and meting out punishments.
Few colleges have developed an intellectual integrity curriculum that treats cheating as a habit and works to counter it over the four years of a student’s college education.
I think that, like any bad habit, students can only be weaned from cheating slowly, with a support program and clear, severe consequences when they are caught.
Cheating in College
Getting a sense of the dimension of the cheating problem on college campuses is not hard.
In February 2026, for example, a Harvard undergraduate student named Matthew Tobin published an opinion piece in the Harvard Crimson entitled “Plagiarize or Perish.”
He cited a 2024 Harvard Crimson study that showed 47% of 850 surveyed senior students said they had cheated.
Tobin wrote that while some people say cheating is the result of “modern students’ scholastic disengagement or use of artificial intelligence,” other issues are at play. Plagiarism and academic misconduct “have been happening all too often at Harvard for far longer than the advent of these issues,” he wrote.
Reported academic misconduct cases increased at Ohio State University by 57% between 2014 and 2018. This is likely a low estimate, since most academic misconduct cases are not reported or investigated.
Charlie McLaughlin, an Oberlin student, published an op-ed in the student newspaper in May 2026 criticizing the college’s decision to change its honor code charter to allow professors to proctor tests, meaning supervise students while they take the exam.
“Changing this policy is a clear sign that this school doesn’t trust us to learn to be adults with integrity,” McLaughlin wrote. “That’s sad. Maybe, it’s also reasonable. Maybe, we don’t deserve that trust. That’s even sadder.”
Princeton also recently abandoned its 133-year-old prohibition against proctoring exams “to address increasing concerns over academic integrity violations, including the proliferation of AI usage.”
A Teacher’s Dilemma
I don’t think of my students as cheaters, and I don’t want to regard them with the kind of suspicion that turns teaching into a policing activity. But it is my job and that of the college where I teach to recognize that our students need a lot of help to develop good academic habits.
Unless colleges acknowledge these facts, I believe they have little chance to curb the pervasiveness of cheating.
Faculty can start by weaving discussions of intellectual integrity throughout their courses and enlisting students to think about who they want to be – and whether they want to live their lives cutting corners and gaming the system. Only then can colleges hope to build what Tobin calls “a commitment to academic integrity in (our) students.”
Skating through elite institutions without actually learning much is precisely how we wound up with CEOs bringing in “AI” to their companies without having any valid use case for it ahead of time, to name but one of the legion of sins of the PMC class.
I’m reminded of Stoller noting in his book “Goliath” that a very large cohort of the New Dealers from the FDR era who turned the country around for the better came from state schools, however it sounds like the rot has reached there as well.
Wright Patman was a star of Goliath. Naturally, the first class of Tech Bros (post-Watergate Atari Democrat dumbasses) pushed him aside. Patman went straight from high school in Texas to law school at Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee. Those who became the “Best and the Brightest” didn’t impress him, much.
Define cheating.
Is writing an in-class paper without having read the book cheating?
Is looking over at someone’s paper once or twice the same level of cheating as going into an exam with a prepared set of answers?
Whatabout knowing someone will look at your paper, and not doing anything about it out of sympathy or intimidation?
There is a difference in kind, I think, between pulling one desperate cheap move and an established campaign with time and effort on the
groundwork for deceit.
The Harvard Study has a 30% number for using AI when not instructed to do so. Probably mean for the bulk of a paper of while answers, but it’s not clear.
Everything you’ve written here is an example of the “Techniques of Neutralization” that was linked to in the text of the article.
Cheating is anything that is considered a violation of the academic integrity policy of the course or the institution. In the same way that even though speeding and drunk driving are crimes that fall under the umbrella of “reckless driving,” with differing severity and different sanctions, the purpose of traffic laws and using the criminal justice system to enforce them is to prevent both kinds of reckless driving from happening, and identify culprits and remediate it if it does happen.
Similarly, even if “looking at someone else’s test for their answers,” is less egregious than “sneaking in your own prepared answer sheet,” they’re both bad, should be prevented, and if one is caught doing either, result in sanctions and interventions, albeit with less harsh punishments or a longer sanction escalation for sneaking peeks compared to wholesale plagarism.
I went through my undergraduate education at a time that smartphones were starting to become widely adopted. I got a Blackberry as a gift for my 21st birthday, and others were starting to use iPhones. Our exams for multiple classes were proctored, and we generally had a three strikes rule for those with wandering eyes. First time was a warning to not look at one’s phone or elsewhere if still submitting questions. Second time was a request to either turn-in the exam as is, or relocate in the exam room to help isolate the student and ask them to surrender their device to the proctor. Third time was a forced end to taking the exam and referral to the department’s dean for academic integrity issues. Comparatively, more egregious cheating like bringing in a pre-written answer sheet resulted in test confiscation and referral to the dean immediately.
Funny you should mention traffic laws.
Conformity seems to play a role in the rampant stop sign running that I see in my town. Stopping at stop signs is for chumps.
I never cheated but I never studied either. Listening in class seemed to be enough. Making learning into a job is asking students to thumb their noses and say “you’re not the boss of me.” IMHO.
Or in other words too much of education is about credentialization. Those who make it into the Ivy League may feel the credentials are already in the bag.
Cheating is a societal norm in the USA, and has been for some decades.
I was once kindly informed that I “Lacked the ethical flexibility to succeed in this business”.
It was meant in a kindly way, and it was true.
The advantage goes to the individual who successfully cheats, the costs are borne by Society as a whole and those costs are substantial.
I think you should be proud to lack ethical flexibility
ethical flexibility… I love it.
Yes this is a societal issue. The ends justify the means for a lot of people, and allowing teenagers to follow along with their example is like asking a Democrat to cave. Yes, just give them an excuse to.
You can’t have the kind of leadership we have and expect anything else. The fish rots from the head!
Monkey see, monkey do, so yeah– totally following the examples set by role models.
Yves nails the issues:
[D]isturbing on multiple levels. First, it suggests that many if not most regard school as an exercise in credential, as opposed to skill, acquisition.
It is largely the credential, the degree, that is marketed as access to a standard of living that may be otherwise unobtainable. And are they wrong? As such, many in our upper-classes are highly-credentialed morons.
Second, it creates a criminogenic environment, in that if a student does not cheat, he is competitively disadvantaged.
That “grade on a curve” thing would seem to reinforce the environment. Pass/Fail exams with an oral component would go far in culling the herd.
Third, it points to a wide-spread decline in ethics. No wonder the US has dropped in corruption perception rankings…
Reputation is seed-corn, and the US has been feasting on this with both hands since the 90s, whereas China (especially over the past decade) has devoted much effort to be seen as a reliable, responsible actor, something that obviously is paying dividends– not that you don’t have Chinese businessmen shipping garbage products from Malaysia or elsewhere, they now just don’t dare do it from China proper as that would reflect poorly on the state and one could experience extreme penalities for this.
Our incentive-structure is in dire need of an overhaul.
This!
Funny, for how much I hear said about how Trump is different or exceptional, he reminds me so much of the upper upper management where I worked. America finally got that CEO President that everyone knew would “fix” America!
From where I sat it sure looked like the CEO was in it for the bucks while he wrecked the company, and I don’t see too much different going on with how Trump runs America. I would not expect any American elite to be significantly different at this point either in running an institution, company or nation.
The education-to-employment road has also changed. In 1965, a UK electronic engineering graduate would be hired by a company like Plessey or Rcal, and expect to be there for their whole career, working their way up. And some part of the first year as a raw graduate would be spent in different departments for a week each to understand the company. So… bad education, lousy prospects.
Now, PMC engineering employment provides no job security. No respect by the institutions leads to no respect for them. Blag one’s way into a job, perhaps sink or swim, and see how it goes. If necessary, move on.
Cheating in finish carpentry: “Putty and paint make it what it ain’t”. However, it will become what it is after a short time in service, and you will get a call-back. Then, if you get a reputation for sloppy work, you will not get work, especially with on-line comments. Probably not applicable to college+ cheaters. Seems, the more they cheat, the higher they go.
Glad you brought up poor workmanship in trades. We did a lot of the construction work on our home 47 years ago (much stronger and less tired then!). So we know what quality workmanship looks like. Back in 1979 most all of the work we hired out was done well (the alcoholic electrician being the sole exception). In the past few years we had to replace windows or roofing, did updates, replace appliances or mechanicals, etc. What a difference a few decades made. Cutting corners seems endemic now and quality of manufactured items seems mostly worse. I’m not sure posting bad experiences on social media roots out “cheaters” in building trades. There is a very real shortage in trades and some of these guys apparently care less about getting repeat business; maybe general contractors take note, however.
Micron is doing site work on a chip fab locally… we’ll see how that goes. The state is rebuilding I81 through the region and it is not uncommon to see concrete work being ripped out because of noncompliance. These major projects are typically years late and over budget. Cheating and incompetence plays a big role.
Anecdotal, but a contractor once told me that if he priced jobs the way they should be, with quality materials and guys who knew what they were doing, he’d never win a bid. Somebody would always undercut him, and apparently most customers just go with the lowest amount.
Depends on the job, and the customer. Smart folk usually go for the median bid +. Too low, the job will be a mess -guaranteed. Too high, you get ripped off.
The shortage in skilled trades, however, is a big issue. Folks do not want to wake up early, I read here a few days ago. And the shortage promises to get worse before it gets better. Master craftsmen are getting old and giving up.
I was a graduate assistant at a state school about a decade ago while working on my degree. I did take action on a couple cheaters during my time but I don’t think the practice was widespread. Easier to turn a blind eye for most professors/teachers.
Another part of the issue, not mentioned in this article, is that schools do not support professors/teachers enforcing the penalties for cheating (i.e. failing them, expelling them, etc.). My university treated the students and, I quote, as “customers” so there is a strong incentive to not punish academic dishonesty.
As Yves said, this is definitely NOT good for society at large.
So you can only be expelled for being against genocide. What a world.
In addition to informal pressure from administrators, the academic misconduct procedures at my public regional university actively discourage reporting: one must email chair, dean, student rights director, and student; the student must accept or deny responsibility, then there must be a hearing, etc. The student affairs associate dean in the college (not the chair) makes the actual decision. For the past several years, my college at least has taken to not even holding the hearings.
So thumbed is the scale that the dean in the college of liberal arts waived a hearing for a PhD student who cheated on his language exam (we’re supposed to believe that he improved from A1 to C1 in 24 hours), because there’s no way to prove that he actually didn’t receive the C1 score. I’m not making that up.
So agreed that the “customer” designation matters. More prevalent, I’d say, is the recourse to the “student success” movement/mantra, which cloaks the more nakedly commercial features of the former for faculty who want to imagine themselves as still doing their jobs. Subsidiary to that is the mantle of “student advocate” that professors and administrators don with pride, so as to justify not doing the messy, embarrassing, and unpleasant business of correcting students.
It’s a problem in Europe as well.
Ultimately it comes down to incentives and ease of accomplishment. I don’t think students are different from any other cross-section of society, in that given an easy way or a hard way, they will generally choose the easy way. The fact that some may choose to justify themselves by arguments about the nature of society, education and so forth are essentially just updated versions of “the dog ate my homework.”
Accepting that many students will cheat if they can, the question is how easy or how difficult you make it for them. Banning smartphones from written exams was one simple way of doing this. Anti-plagiarism software is in my experience now so effective that it acts as a real disincentive to cheat on written assignments, though there are still those who think they can get away with it.
In spite of what the authors suggest, AI is fundamentally different in that it brings together the maximum of temptation, the maximum of opportunity and the maximum economy of time and effort. It’s also much more difficult to detect reliably, and, unlike plagiarism, it’s almost impossible to prove beyond doubt. It’s also much easier to defend (AI did the first draft, I used AI to find some references, I asked AI if the text could be improved) and which are again effectively impossible to disprove.
But I think the battle is being lost, unless we go back to the pen and paper days of my youth. The problem is that like all superficially easy and convenient solutions, AI has massive drawbacks. We’re now looking at a generation exiting university which has never really learned how to do research, nor write structured and organised prose. And if the AI boom goes bust, as it looks as if it will, they really will be in it.
This is nothing new. When I was in college in 1969, I remember being in a frat house where someone showed me a file cabinet filled with term papers that were graded well, all from previous students who had graduated over the years. If a current student at the fraternity needed to submit a paper, he could easily go through the file cabinet, find one that fits, copy it on a typewriter and hand it in.
Not that long ago the advent of online learning platforms (like Mastering Physics or EdX ) were a welcome innovation to help deliver homework and online exams/quizzes for huge first year classes.
Then sites like Course Hero or Chegg arose that bought and sold answers to questions scraped from the web. Students would simply look up the answers in one tab with the HW or quiz open in the other. Now with Artificial Information, they just copy and paste the question and get their answer ( not always right btw). Can’t tell you how many times a student has come to me with help on an assigned question THAT WAS MARKED CORRECT. They had no idea how to do it.
Thats IF they come to office hours. They’ve stopped coming and told us they just use AI.
Because so many students are getting near 100% on their online HW and quizzes, but 50% on their handwritten exams, we’ve abandoned online assessments and use mostly in class ones for the bulk of the grade. (Retaining some nominal grades for online work to get them to do it. Not everyone cheats, and some retention for those that do is better than none)
Pencil and paper with no devices as they sit in front of you is the only way. What was old is new again.
I taught a college STEM class for the last 6 years. My class could not use AI since it was making engineering drawings so they had to learn 2D or 3D CAD so I didn’t have to deal with the cheating, but I did have to deal with “disabled” students. Which is where I saw a problem.
They handed out these “disabled” exemptions like candy. We would be informed we had so many disabled students in our class. We would contact them as ask what they needed to succeed in the class. Most didn’t even answer. We had to give them extra time, tutor, or whatever they wanted to make sure they made it through the class. Whatever it took.
Some had legitimate handicaps such as hearing, or a physical handicap where using a computer made it difficult. No issues with any of that. But, many, and I would go as far as saying most, didn’t need anything. They were perfectly capable of doing the work like everyone else, but they wanted the “disability” exemption to skip class, be late on assignments, and do as little as absolutely possible. And we were expected to pass them. Sports people were pretty much the same.
I ended up in the Dean’s office due to one kid who missed 11 of the first 20 classes and 7 out of the last 8 and somehow it was my fault. I didn’t have enough empathy for disabled people. I told the Dean there was nothing wrong with this kid. He was nothing but an excuse factory playing us all for chumps getting the disabled tag. That didn’t go over so well. I didn’t care and was part of why I left. I can’t teach people who don’t care about learning. Unfortunately, life will sort these kind out.
As I recall from my university aeronautical engineering, circa 1960, virtually all tests were given open book and time limited. Comprehension of principles and methods precluded shortcuts. Properly setting up the problem for solution was often worth 90% credit. Looking at another person’s paper might only reveal a multiple term differential equation written in pencil. In some cases, such as thermodynamics, the test questions had different initial conditions.
As for the ethics of the matter, students see that there is potentially a big payoff in life for lying and cheating. See for example the US Congress or, for an extreme case, the President.
I did my University exams in the mid-90’s with a pen and a ruler and a calculator. Nobody owned a mobile let alone a smartphone. This was after yearly exams at school, including two years of public exams.
Every end of year exam I ever took was invigilated, with observers at the front and back of the room. Every student sat at a single desk with a good six feet between them and the columns either side, wide enough for the invigilator to walk down. In the public exams and at University, they would follow you to the toilet.
My son sat his first senior end of year exams this week. He can take in a pen, pencil, ruler and approved calculator in a clear plastic bag. Nothing else! Even replacement ink cartridges are banned (presumably people gave used empty ones for smuggling answers…). Mobile phones have been banned in school since March anyway.
This is the way in the UK. It blows my mind that US students do these on their honour!
After-thought. I was a front-row kid who ended up sitting with the back row kids because they had more fun. My deskmates would quite often gave skipped their prep to have fun but they were all hardworking and caught up by exam time. However, in weekly tests they would crib answers. One mate got busted copying my German vocab test because he reflexively copied my name on the answer sheet in his handwriting….
Some of what is labeled “cheating” is passive-aggressive rebellion expressing itself. Claims of disability are partly the same.
I don’t think teaching administration — the source of authoritarian vibes — is at all innocent. Just one example of a very common, very bad policy: grading on the curve.
Students rightly resent being graded like eggs or tomatoes, rather than being supported to achieve mastery of skills or a body of knowledge. Identifying talent is important, but so is professional mastery. It is hard on one’s self-esteem to be a chronic B-student, never fully prepared to advance but advancing anyway but handicapped by past shortcomings.
I have taught in B-schools and active class participation can be critical but it can be hard work for the teacher to distribute attention in support of adequate participation. Easier to have pets.
Also, the kind of structured pedagogy with a depth of exercises and materials to support getting everyone over a well-defined threshold of mastery, takes a much bigger investment than handing out “disability” accommodation.
This reads to me like a “crossword puzzles are going to be the downfall of society” post. I don’t see this as a new phenomenon. Cheating was rampant when I went to college 25 years ago and we didn’t have cell phones or AI (We did have TI86 graphing calculators though! Mine could even play snake.) Many tests I took were not designed to judge actual learning, but rather how many facts I could cram into my brain in an all-night study session. And most of learning is really “learning how to learn.” In my current profession, I couldn’t possibly be expected to memorize everything I need to know. But I know how to quickly go find out what I need and verify the results. That’s way more important of a skill and something I figured out on my own, not that I was taught directly. Don’t even get me started on modern grade school teaching. The no child left behind and standardized testing an anathema to actual learning. So until you fix the system you’ll keep getting the same results.
One problem, I think, is that many students don’t even know what cheating is.
One thing that happened that lost me pretty much all my faith in higher education took place when a student “plagiarized” an email I sent him. For many of the reasons brought up by others here, I came to put a lot of value on essay tests and in somewhat unusual manner–I wanted the students to “show all their steps” as if they were answering math questions. I also spent a lot of time snswering their questions by email, with examples of how they might use what they (should have) read and how to weave them in constructing their answers. Now, one student decided thst rather than try to come up with his own answer, he should just copy and paste examples I gave him. It is the right answer, isn’t it? As long as it’s the right answer, what’s wrong with it? Me? I was completely dumbfounded.
Of course, what took the cake was that the administration took the view that the student was in the right–not so much because he was, but they didn’t want to bother.
The premise behind my idea of good liberal arts education is that you can give any answer you like, but you don’t get to make stuff up (ha!) and you don’t get to appeal blindly to aurhority. So I assigned a set of reading materials based on how different people made such and such arguments based on such and such logic and such and such empirical evidence, with the lectures dedicated to evaluating both the quality of the argument and evidence as well as identify both stated and unstated premises and place them in context. So someone trying to fish for the “right answers” is doing exactly the wrong thing given the design of the courses and this was made explicit to the students on day 1 of each semester. Since they rarely came across pedagogy like this, a lot of hand holding was necessary and it paid off often enough. This was also not something that was easily amenable to cheating on the part of the students. But, at the same time, this was not exactly something students appreciated who felt that this was complicating things “needlessly.” Well, maybe they aren’t necessarily wrong…but in a world things are changing rapidly, the right answers of yesterday probably aren’t right today and it’s probably important to at least begin thinking about how the right answers, if any exists, m ight be changing. But, alas, today’s higher ed, at least the way it’s run, is designed exactly to crush this sort of thinking in all too many settings, I fear.
A significant portion of the key participants in higher education (faculty, students, administration) never cared much about ideas (their origins, insights offered, applications, or consequences).
Their real passion was for climbing the prestige aristocracy ladder whose first step was having the right credentials from the right school and getting those credentials by any means necessary.
I started working at a university pretty late in my so-called career, and after a year or so of getting to know people in the financial aid office, the manager confided to me one day that the students “now” [back then] lied all the time, as if that was just their default reflex behavior. She thought they basically lacked any concept of honesty, because some of the lying was transparent and not even helpful to whatever they were trying to negotiate. This was about 15 years ago, so I imagine cheating would just be part and parcel of a whole culture where honesty was a meaningless term. I avoided contact with students as much as possible, so I can’t confirm whether her assessment was correct.
Doing the work as best you are able is less stressful than cutting corners, cheating. I came to that conclusion in my early teens. I had never been faced with the choice until then. I tried it because others were enthusiastic cheaters. It always felt wrong, sneaky, to me. I stopped almost at once. I never did it again. I attended a college that had a long standing honor system. I liked that. There was a file of old exams, just the questions, in the fraternity house. It made little if any difference that I could see. This was in the 1950s.
If all you want is a piece of paper, your “hall pass” as it were, I suppose it makes little difference. No. That’s wrong. It makes a difference. It speaks volumes about you.
“cheating” is a complicated thing. i often discussed this with my peers. as an enginereing major at least, with 1 or 2 jobs, a social life, working in a research lab, you have to get really good at figuring out what is important and prioritizing it. i know some people take it too far, but there’s a point where copying your friend’s homework so you can attend a party or spend more time on another harder class is the smart move. if all you do is get good grades by your own effort, you will have a smaller network and ultimately just be less accomplished. i let my grades take a lot of hits in order to do things outside of class. i maintain this was worth it. it’s about finding the minimum effort you can put in for the maximum reward.
my junior year i had an absurd workload and was unwilling to quit my job or give up my social life. (i gave up reading the news lol.) my friends and i ran a homework ring where we’d copy each others homeworks. i would have gotten two letter grades worse on pchem if not for copying my friend’s homeworks. in another class, my friends and i quickly discovered the answers were available in full online. once we realized that it was impossible to find the motivation to do the homework ourselves. in yet another class, i was friends with the TAs, and my friends would send a representative to office hours to get the answers, then copy. i was able to join a research lab and attend more parties with the free time from that. i dont regret it. i still performed decent on exams and maintained a passable understanding of the content.
and this might be toxic. but i view being good at collaborating on assignments and getting answers and old exams from people who took the classes before as a skill in and of itself. some of the guys in my cohort were honestly kinda dumb, but they were exceptionally good at getting others to do their homework for them. while i dont see these guys as becoming excellent researchers, they have a clear future in sales or management or something. good people skills can compensate for poor math skills, to an extent. i was often the guy letting his homework be copied, as it builds good relationships with guys who i know will return the favor in the future.
me and my classmates once discussed how high stakes exams are good, because they force us to learn the content. if we didn’t have those, it’s impossible to ignore how we can cheat and use the time on other things in our lives. we actually asked a teacher to make a class more difficult and high stakes, as its motivational.
my answers might not be completely representative though. i was in an engineering program that always had pen and paper exams and few essays. for written assignments, people who relied on ai often got bad grades because the ai gave poor results. the work was objectively bad, the use of ai wasnt a problem itself. i myself have used ai to help with assignments, and it can be a genuinely useful tool. flagrant cheating is obviously bad, but it doesn’t even yield good results on exams or projects. so like. whats the point.
College is sold to us as the only way to secure a decent, middle class job, and that is the only way out of the awful existence of dead end retail/service/gig work unless you want to enter the better compensated but physically demanding and often dangerous trades.
Combine the intense pressure that the degree is everything and failure to get it dooms one to a life of poverty and misery with a society that directly rewards the most corrupt, self serving, anti social behavior in the cutthroat capitalist market and how can we be surprised? The top of our society is populated almost exclusively by vapid moral degenerates who rub their rejection of the most basic sense of community responsibility in everyone’s faces. The message we send to everyone is “only cheaters win, everyone else is a sucker,” so it’s a bit ridiculous for us to be surprised or join every generation in history in lamenting the “moral decay” of the young.
When I was in Graduate School, I was disgusted by the so-called “Professionalism,” of many of my fellow students. The Doctorate was simply, in their eyes, the necessary first step in their about-to-be highly successful professional/managerial careers. Many were in a rush, understandably, to get on to some cushy “expert” position.
What really, really seemed to matter was the status and the cash, despite all their political pieties about supporting the working class–which, of course, must always be from a comfortable office overlooking a beautifully manicured lawn.