Chronicle of Higher Education, Cheating Has Become Normal:

Faculty members are overwhelmed, and the solutions aren’t clear.

Before she returned to teaching last spring after a leave of absence, Amy Clukey braced for the possibility that her students might cheat with ChatGPT. She’d heard complaints from her fellow professors and thought, sure, that’s not good. But plagiarism had never been much of a problem in her English classes.

“I was always, like, I’ll create unique assignments and they will be somewhat plagiarism-proof, and some students will get by me,” said Clukey, an associate professor at the University of Louisville. “But that’s fine because most of them will be doing their own work, and it’ll be great.”

It wasn’t great.

“I was just hit,” she said, “by a student army of cheating.”

Students cheated on informal discussion-board prompts. They cheated on essays. A few weeks ago, she emailed a student to say that she knew the student had cheated on a minor assignment with AI and if she did it again, she would fail the course. Clukey also noted there were several missed assignments. The student replied to “sincerely apologize,” said she was “committed to getting back on track,” and that she regretted “any disruption [her] absence or incomplete work may have caused in the course.” But her next paper was essentially written by artificial intelligence. Curious, Clukey asked ChatGPT to write an email apologizing to a professor for plagiarism and missed work.

“And what did it do?” she said. “It spit out an email almost exactly like the one I had gotten.”

Talk to professors in writing-intensive courses, particularly those teaching introductory or general-education classes, and it sounds as if AI abuse has become pervasive. Clukey said she feels less like a teacher and more like a human plagiarism detector, spending hours each week analyzing her students’ writing to determine its authenticity.

But it’s not AI that has a lot of professors worried. It’s what lies behind that willingness to cheat. While the reasons vary by student and situation, certain explanations surface frequently. Students are working long hours while taking full course loads. They doubt their ability to perform well. They arrive at college with weak reading and study skills. They don’t value the assignments they’re given. They feel like the only way they can succeed is to be perfect. They believe they will not be punished — or not punished harshly — if caught. And many, it seems, don’t feel particularly guilty about it.

Some institutions, including Middlebury College, in Vermont, and Stanford University, are reconsidering elements of their honor codes because they’re simply not working. At Middlebury, the percentage of students who admitted on an annual survey to violating the honor code rose from 35 percent in 2019 to 65 percent in 2024. The most common self-reported violations were using unauthorized aids, such as SparkNotes or a friend, cheating on a test, and misusing AI.

In an online course, Clukey estimates that more than half of her students have plagiarized with AI. “When it’s that widespread, it’s a culture,” she said. “It’s not just an individual student, one out of an entire class or two out of the entire class. It is so many. And when I talk to some undergrads, they’re like, ‘Everybody does it.’”

When so many students admit to cheating, what does academic integrity mean anymore? …

Little of what’s happening at Middlebury or elsewhere is surprising to people who study academic integrity. Researchers have long documented that many students cheat at some point in their educational career, and that their motivations are situational rather than character based.

The reasons they cheat have also remained relatively consistent over the years. The shifts have been in the pressures that lead students to cheat and the ease with which they can do so. Practically speaking, that means that while some colleges used to see higher incidences of cheating in STEM courses with high-stakes exams, grading on the curve, and competition among students to get the best grade, generative AI’s arrival has made it increasingly common for students to cheat on low-stakes assignments, like discussion-board posts and short essays.

But do more students cheat today than in the past? It’s hard to know. Data so far is limited, and studies often rely on students to self-report. Some research documented a spike in cheating in online courses during the pandemic. Another study, which surveyed high-school students before and after ChatGPT’s arrival, did not find an increase in cheating over time. Other studies done before 2020 suggest that cheating may have fallen since the 1990s or early 2000s.

Still, data is cold comfort for faculty members faced with conspicuous cheating in their classes, and students who witness classmates cheat without consequence. …

Faculty members may be on the front lines of the battle against cheating, but they say it can’t be theirs to fight alone. They want support from administrators to help deal with the reasons why students cheat, and backing from their college if they report students for academic-integrity violations.

Chronicle of Higher Education, Cheaters, Cheaters, Purpose Eaters

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