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.
When it’s that widespread, it’s a culture. It’s not just an individual student. It is so many. And when I talk to some undergrads, they’re like, ‘Everybody does 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? Middlebury has been wrestling with this question as it undergoes an examination of its honor code, which states that students have a “moral obligation” to turn in classmates who cheat and largely does not allow professors to proctor exams. Those parts of the code could eventually be removed.
An interim report released in May by an honor-code-review committee found that, while campus culture generally affirms the value of academic integrity and that cheating is wrong, “the reality of daily practice suggests that the honor code has ceased to be a meaningful element of learning and living at Middlebury for most students.”
Along with pointing to the sharp rise in students who admit to violating the honor code, the authors note that few students report others for cheating; there is widespread confusion about how violations are adjudicated; and many professors want to proctor exams. Widespread use of generative AI adds another layer of complexity, but the report makes clear that problems with the honor system go far beyond what’s made possible with ChatGPT.
Many students, the report says, feel tremendous pressure to get A’s; anything less is seen as a failure. As a result, grades matter more than integrity. In the student survey, only 34 percent of students said they felt guilty violating the honor code. Other reasons students say they cheat include confusion over what their professors define as cheating; the ease of cheating through phones, AI, and unproctored exams; and the pressure to cheat when you see your classmates doing so.
None of this was surprising to Hannah Sayre, a senior at Middlebury. In April 2023 she wrote an opinion essay for The Middlebury Campus student newspaper describing the blatant cheating she had witnessed during a midterm exam. “With phones in their laps, four students copied down answers from their screens,” she wrote. “They showed their exams to one another and copied down answers for each other’s papers. They whispered loudly to one another, discussing questions and answers as if there were no one else in the room. This went on for the entirety of the two-hour exam.”
Sayre’s essay was a call to proctor exams, but it was also a callout to Middlebury, arguing that an honor system that depends on students valuing academic integrity without any checks or reinforcements “is an unattainable utopia.”
In an interview, Sayre echoed the committee’s findings. The pressure for perfect grades can be intense. And that, combined with “the sense Middlebury doesn’t care if it’s allowing students to cheat or making it easy for them to,” simply fuels the cheating culture.
“I can imagine there’s a lot of students out there who felt like I did in that exam, where they thought, ‘This is ridiculous. My peers are getting away with this, and now I’m in a really tough situation where I feel like I have to also break the rules if I want to compete with them academically.’” Proctoring, she said, would at least level that playing field.
Both Sayre and Emily Wight, one of the students who sat on the honor-code-review committee, believe that online schooling during the pandemic shifted the paradigm around cheating. Zoom classes in high school, which many students felt were both underwhelming and frustrating, were easily cheatable, which made it normal. “It’s not like an ethical dilemma,” said Wight, who graduated in May, about how students often view cheating. “It’s more of a practical concern with cheating where it’s like, OK, this thing is due at midnight. I have 10 things to do. I’m going to copy this.”
“It’s a mix of ease, convenience, and, frankly, lack of punishment,” said Wight, who was also the student chair of the campus judicial board.
Members of the honor-code-review committee, which includes professors and administrators, concluded that academic integrity needed to be recentered in campus life. To that end, the report recommends that Middlebury “publicly and regularly define and affirm the meaning and importance of academic integrity.” As part of that affirmation, it encourages professors to clarify, “in each semester and in every course, the importance of academic integrity, what it means, and why it matters.”
The committee also recommended removing the moral obligation for students to report cheating because it is unrealistic and puts an unfair burden on them. And it recommended allowing professors to proctor exams at their discretion.
“Ultimately we came to a kind of training-wheels situation,” said Wight. “Middlebury is sick. It’s not fatally flawed. But clearly integrity is in something of a crisis right now where students are not acting in maybe the most upright way. How can we fix this?” The model they adopted, she said, was “trust but verify.” (Other members of the committee declined interview requests, saying they were still too early in the review process to discuss findings and next steps.)
Professors have been reflecting on the committee’s report and what it says about the college. “I’m really saddened that there’s something that seems to be broken in the culture of academic honesty here,” said Amanda Gregg, an associate professor of economics who has taught at Middlebury since 2015.
Gregg has spoken with her students in various settings about what’s going on with the culture of honesty. “What’s interesting to me is how much they love the honor code and would be very sad if it was repealed,” she said. Students like the tradition and the assumption that they will behave with integrity. “But on the other hand, they also acknowledge that there is not a culture of social sanctions against cheating. One student was not embarrassed to tell me at a dinner in front of 10 other students, ‘Of course I’m going to cheat’ in some gen-ed, or what we call distribution requirements, class. ‘You know, some pain-in-the-butt thing that I don’t see as particularly relevant.’
“I remember the student saying to me, ‘You wouldn’t, Professor Gregg?’ And I said of course I wouldn’t,” she continued. “‘In my social group [in college] there were major social sanctions for cheating. To be really blunt, I wouldn’t be friends with someone who cheated.’ And they were shocked when I said this. They just thought I was making it up.”
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.
Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the academic-integrity office at the University of California at San Diego and an expert on educational integrity, said she has been hearing from faculty members who feel overwhelmed by AI. She encourages professors, and colleges, to think about academic integrity in different ways. Rather than focusing on catching cheaters, which can be time-consuming and demoralizing, they should create supports and guardrails that discourage students from cheating and encourage them to do their own work. That could include proctoring exams, devising assignments for which AI would not get a passing grade, moving toward flipped classrooms, and talking more explicitly to students about why authentic learning matters.
I can see why they make these choices. It’s self-defeating and self-sabotaging, but there is a logic to it.
“I have faculty say that, ‘Well, I just want to trust students. We should be able to trust students.’” said Bertram Gallant. “And I say, ‘You can trust that they’re human beings and they’re going to make bad decisions under stress and pressure. That’s what you can trust.’”
Talia Waltzer, a postdoctoral scholar in the department of psychology at UC San Diego, has dug into why students cheat to help explain a common paradox: People regularly do things that violate their own values or hurt others. Studies show that students value academic integrity and honesty, so how do they decide to cheat or rationalize cheating? Getting at that answer, Waltzer said, can help academics think about ways to mitigate the problem.
In one study, Waltzer and a co-author interviewed about 200 undergraduates. They found that many students, when reflecting on a cheating episode, didn’t initially recognize what they did as cheating. For example, they may not have understood that what they did constituted plagiarism. While the study was done before ChatGPT arrived, Waltzer said students may be similarly confused about what use of AI is appropriate, if any.
When students were aware that they were cheating, they would sometimes explain that they thought it was OK within the particular situation. “In a lot of these cases,” Waltzer said, “students are talking about assignments that they perceive as not being valuable for their career and learning goals, not advancing their skills, their long-term goals. It might be for a general-education requirement. It might be a class assignment that they would describe as busy work. They don’t see the point in doing this work.”
In other instances, students felt they had pressing reasons to cheat that outweighed their motivation to act with integrity. They might have felt like they couldn’t get the aid they needed, such as tutoring, in order to do the assignment properly; that they needed a high grade to advance in their major; or that they wanted to support a friend who was in danger of failing.
In another study, Waltzer and two co-authors analyzed how instructors teach about academic integrity. They sat in on lectures and examined course material, including syllabi, in about 60 courses. They also interviewed students. They found that instructors rarely talked about, or even defined, academic integrity, although most did include a statement in their syllabus. If they did speak about why students should not cheat, the discussions were brief, focused more on sanctions, and didn’t include many definitions of cheating. Professors rarely spoke about why students should act with integrity or value learning. One finding from the study was that, as a result, students often misremembered or were uncertain about classroom policies.
The authors noted that professors may assume that students have a solid understanding of what academic integrity means and why it’s important, so they don’t see a need to cover such ground in class. But Waltzer sees that as a missed opportunity to provide guidance.
Faculty members could speak frankly, Waltzer said, about the pressure they know students are under and offer ideas and resources on how to manage their workload. They could space out assignments and offer greater clarity on what they consider appropriate and inappropriate forms of collaboration or outside assistance. They could allow a one-time, no-questions-asked extension. They could talk about why they design assignments a certain way and the value students will get from them.
It’s not, of course, as if some professors aren’t trying those things. Clukey, the associate professor at the University of Louisville, for example, spent an entire class period talking to her students about why it’s important not to cheat. She told them that even if they don’t like literature, they are learning transferable skills, such as how to write and analyze language. She explained how you could theoretically cheat your way through college, but what would happen in graduate school or the work force if you had never developed any skills? She spoke about the importance of trust in the classroom and the impact poor preparation has on class discussions.
She doesn’t really know if her talk had an impact. Students nodded along, but a few wrote in their anonymous mid-semester evaluations that spending a whole class period on academic integrity was a waste of time. “And of course, when I went to grade their papers,” she said, “a bunch of them were plagiarized.”
Despite her deep frustration, Clukey feels empathy for her students. They tell her they do care about academic integrity. But many work 20 to 30 hours a week while taking a full course load. They are under pressure, including from family members, to secure a good job after graduation. Under those conditions, a required English class falls pretty low on their list of things to care about. “I can see why they make these choices,” she said. “It’s self-defeating and self-sabotaging, but there is a logic to it.”
Her next step, she said, is to move more work into the classroom, even though she knows that students don’t do their best under time constraints and spending several class periods having them write a five-page paper leaves less time for her to spend on content. Clukey is also tired of well-meaning advice to make her assignments more interesting and relevant to students’ lives. She’s somewhat limited because of the focus of her courses, she said. And if students have been using ChatGPT so far, they’re not building the skills they need to do a project on something of interest to them.
She has also started reporting students for cheating, although she tries to use it as a teaching moment. She tells students she believes they are fully capable of doing the work. At her university, students get a warning the first time, academic probation the second time. So, she said, they have an opportunity to make changes. Still, she knows that few of her colleagues are turning students in. Instead they are just giving zeros.
Other instructors have also reached their limit with cheating and believe that enforcement of academic-integrity policies, as byzantine as the process can be on many campuses, may be the only way forward. Justin Sider, an associate professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, said he has told students he will fail them for using ChatGPT on their papers and is turning them over to the Office of Academic Integrity. “I have gone toward increasingly stringent warnings for students regarding plagiarism in my classes,” he said. “Because it does take up so much time, and I find the explanations and defenses unconvincing.”
Gregg, the Middlebury economics professor, said she is spending more time making clear to students that she values integrity. She speaks to them about what a great opportunity they have in college to get feedback on their writing, and how they shouldn’t waste that chance to improve by using AI instead. But she’s also puzzled by why students aren’t more motivated by their professors’ interest. “It’s hard for me to believe at a place like Middlebury that there’s a single class here where faculty aren’t extremely excited about the material and think that’s really important and send the message that integrity matters.”
She has concluded that some of what students are doing is just classic, short-sighted behavior: Prioritize the present, even if you’re hurting your future self. That’s one reason why she is in favor of proctoring exams. (The economics department was given an exemption to the no-proctoring policy a decade ago, because of a high incidence of cheating.)
Gregg also requires students to write in Google docs, which enables her to see an edit history. And she will start reporting students she suspects of using AI to write their essays. She used to have a “dim view” of academic-integrity enforcement, she said, but has since concluded that it’s important to document cases.
She has also given up on using discussion boards, because she realized that she was wasting time responding to AI-generated posts. “I know people who have just decided, ‘My time is really important, I don’t care.’ So they ChatGPT their reply to the student. And so we’ve got robots talking to robots. And that, to me, is the end of higher education right there. That’s the apocalypse.”
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.
The honor-code-review committee at Middlebury, for example, acknowledged that few faculty members report students because they find the process “exhausting and time-consuming, as well as demoralizing when students are found not guilty.” One of its recommendations is to update and clarify the process, with an emphasis on using student violations as “teaching moments.” And as part of its call for the campus to “publicly and regularly” affirm the value of academic integrity, it recommended reinstating an honor-code signing ceremony during orientation and using the academic-integrity committee to allow faculty to share best practices and resources around academic integrity in the classroom.
Academic-integrity experts say administrators should consider threats to academic integrity and honesty as a collective challenge. One researcher likened combating cheating to fighting an infectious disease. “Preventing epidemics requires a comprehensive, multilevel, systems-based approach; it’s not the result of few good doctors and scientists working in isolation,” writes Jason M. Stephens, an associate professor at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, who researches academic motivation and moral development, in an essay in the magazine Change.
Nor do honor codes hold any special power. The committees at both Stanford and Middlebury, for example, found that the codes had little impact on student behavior. “The physical code is just an artifact of what’s supposed to be an underlying culture, which is full of beliefs and belief systems and values,” said Bertram Gallant.
She agrees that institutions and professors need to work in tandem if the values embedded in the code are to carry weight. That includes, she said, administrative support for faculty members who feel overwhelmed and unsure of how to tackle cheating, such as time and assistance to help redesign their courses.
Wight, the Middlebury graduate, said her time on the honor-code-review committee showed her how complicated the challenge of upholding and enforcing academic integrity can be. Students don’t necessarily want more punishment, but many she spoke to were less forgiving in their attitudes toward cheating than professors, especially when they felt the lack of accountability was hurting them.
One thing did become clear to her, though. “A big part of integrity,” she said, “is if the school doesn’t take it seriously, the students won’t either.”
