Overview:
The rise in AI-enabled cheating reflects a deeper crisis of student disengagement and lost faith in the purpose of education, requiring schools to move beyond bans and detection toward learning experiences that restore curiosity, agency, meaning, and personal growth.
ChatGPT was introduced in my second year of college. In the years since, I’ve seen education thrown into chaos, with talk of A.I. coming to dominate conversations and headlines. Yet, having talked to over 2,000 students in 15 cities worldwide with my non-profit A.I. Consensus, I believe addressing today’s cheating epidemic will require us to look beyond AI. The roots of this crisis go far deeper: students no longer believe in the value of our education system.
In an essay contest in 2024, we asked students how A.I. was transforming their learning, drawing responses from 70 students across 35 schools. Many showered praises on A.I., saying it helps them pursue curiosities, helps personalize learning, and keeps them organized. Yet the majority of responses could not help but reflect on how AI hurt their learning. Students wrote that A.I. devalued our words and let us outsource our thinking; they worried that A.I. takes the social element out of learning; that using A.I. is becoming second-nature like a drug, and us students willing addicts.
I hear the same in the events we host. Like our teachers, we too feel helpless as we watch our classmates hand in expertly-humanized A.I.-generated essays and install A.I. softwares to feed them answers during online oral exams. A 2023 BestColleges survey of college students found that 51% believe that using AI for schoolwork is cheating, yet 22% of surveyed students use AI anyway.
So if not for a lack of awareness, why are almost 1 out of every 10 college students cheating with A.I.? I believe the answer lies in students’ relationship to the education system, an issue which long predates generative A.I. Students are failing to find purpose in education: as a means to our goals rather than an end in itself.
For example, in 1970s, 80% of students responding to UCLA’s “American Freshman” study said that ‘developing a meaningful philosophy of life’ was the top reason to attend college, while less than 40% mentioned ‘being very well off financially’. By 2015, the trend had flipped. Some 74% said ‘being very well off financially’ was the top reason while only 43% named ‘developing a meaningful philosophy of life.’
To get into university in the first place, we hustle through standardized exams and competitive application processes, incentivizing us not to be curious but to ‘achieve’. Within classrooms, we are constrained to a slow crawl of bureaucracies while the world outside races on. At the same time, students are increasingly strained and feel they have no control over their learning, with nearly half of K-12 students feeling school is not engaging. Through all of this, we find ourselves asking: what exactly is the point?
Generative A.I. only added fuel to this fire. On one end, these tools democratized the ability to hand off obligations students might see as unnecessary, enabling both curiosity and cheating. Simultaneously, the threat of A.I.-generated assignments and a turn towards autocratic solutions such as A.I. bans, A.I. detectors, and reinstating hand-written blue book exams eroded trust within the classroom. On top of it all, students face a precarious entry-level job market, adding further doubt and anxiety.
To be clear, I am no fan of cheating. Yet a myopic emphasis on ending the war between ever-more-devious students and ever-more-frustrated professors only distracts from the deeper problems. A.I. bans may be effective and necessary for this present crisis, but we must also be cognizant of the counterproductive impacts of these solutions, and proactive about when they go too far.
Truly addressing this current cheating epidemic will require seizing the opportunities this moment of change presents. If the roots of this issue lie in the structure of our educational systems, then we must start there. Bans in the name of personal development and integrating AI use and content into curriculum may be part of this, but we must recognize that negative solutions can only prevent harm and marginal changes within today’s paradigm will remain surface level. Somenew, bold, positive vision is needed, such as designing education around helping students answer foundational questions such as “who do I want to become?”
Although the current crisis may look existential, I believe curiosity, that most innate human trait, will prevail. Thus, AI ultimately represents hope to me: not as the end of education, but as something that can reorient us around the end, orpurpose, of education.
