Every student is cheating with AI

Last month, a Brown professor wrote about discovering that a majority of his students had used AI to cheat on his take-home exam. He was irate about this “scandal,” despite the university seemingly doing little to respond.

I attended a well-ranked university until last year. The truth is: essentially every student is cheating with AI. Every single one. Nobody doesn’t cheat.

It comes in the form of coding assignments fully produced by ChatGPT, running problem sets through Claude, and writing foreign-language essays with the help of Gemini.

Take-home exams are entirely free rein. Basically every student cheats in some form on take-home exams.

The Brown professor’s article doesn’t describe any kind of isolated behavior. Every student at a university today knows that this is the truth.

So why is cheating with AI so common? Other forms of cheating — say, plagiarism or paying someone to write your essay — were quite uncommon. I think it comes down to a few things:

  1. Cheating with AI feels easy and harmless. No one else is involved. And using AI for other parts of life is pretty commonplace.
  2. Everyone’s cheating with AI. There is no stigma.
  3. Take-home exams are so laughably cheatable that it feels like the professor can’t expect you not to cheat — whether with AI or just by Googling the answers. Students very often feel like a take-home exam is *wink wink* encouragement from the professor to cheat on the exam and produce a favorable class average.

One could argue that this is a moral failure on the students’ part. They know it’s cheating, and cheating is wrong. Plus, they’re cheating themselves out of an education. Etc, etc.

But with AI, we’re all fat kids left alone in a candy store. Given that situation — abundant AI, take-home exams, looming deadlines, and more fun things to do — can you honestly say that you would have stayed on the straight and narrow?

University professors are a bit like personal trainers. We hire them to do something that we know is good for us, but that we wouldn’t do otherwise. (If you could learn everything yourself, and find other people to do it with, you probably wouldn’t go to university.)

A personal trainer wouldn’t leave you alone in the gym for the second half of your session and believe that you diligently finished the workout. It would be too easy to cheat. You hire a trainer because your own force of will, in the moment of facing difficulty, is not to be trusted.

Professors and universities need to face that every student is cheating with AI. Even the ones you think are wonderful and would never. Build the environment around the realistic understanding that — under the pressure of grades, deadlines in a slew of classes, and with unmonitored take-home exams and assignments — everyone is bending the rules.