The Cheating Vibe Shift
With ChatGPT and other AI tools, cheating in college feels easier than ever — and students are telling professors that it’s no big deal.

In This Episode
With the help of ChatGPT and other AI tools, cheating in college has become so easy and commonplace that some students don’t see much wrong with a little academic dishonesty. Meanwhile, professors are screaming into the void, trying to convince students that relying on AI to do their work will hurt them in the long run. But is the battle for academic integrity already lost?
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In This Episode
With the help of ChatGPT and other AI tools, cheating in college has become so easy and commonplace that some students don’t see much wrong with a little academic dishonesty. Meanwhile, professors are screaming into the void, trying to convince students that relying on AI to do their work will hurt them in the long run. But is the battle for academic integrity already lost?
Related Reading:
- Cheating Has Become Normal
- I’m a Student. You Have No Idea How Much We’re Using ChatGPT.
- ChatGPT Is a Plagiarism Machine
- Is Reading Over for Gen Z Students? (podcast)
Guest: Beth McMurtrie, senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education
Transcript
This transcript was produced using a speech-recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.
Jack Stripling This is College Matters from the Chronicle.
Beth McMurtrie Students are getting messages from each other, from their own lives, from their friends, from social media, from commercials on TV, telling them that AI can actually do a lot of the work that they don’t feel like doing. So I don’t really know how you sort all this out when you’re a young person.
Jack Stripling Ask anybody in higher education today and they’ll tell you, student cheating is on the rise and it’s becoming a serious challenge for professors. From plagiarism to the use of AI tools, students are finding new ways to bypass academic integrity, leaving educators struggling to keep up. To help shed light on this issue, we’re joined by Beth McMurtrie, a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, who recently wrote a thought provoking article exploring the growing prevalence of cheating in colleges. Beth will share insights into why this is happening, what it means for professors, and how institutions are responding to this shift in academic behavior. Beth, welcome to College Matters from the Chronicle.
Beth McMurtrie Hi, Jack. Thanks for having me.
Jack Stripling So it’s great to have you here. You’ve been covering, teaching and learning for years. What made you want to look into cheating?
Beth McMurtrie Well, you know, I’ve been noticing a lot of really significant changes in classroom dynamics since the pandemic hit. And one of the things I had been hearing from professors was this explosive use of AI in unauthorized ways in their classrooms. You know, students were using AI not only to significantly help them with their papers, but even with short assignments, you know, multiple choice exams, discussion board posts, things like that. And it was really overwhelming a lot of instructors in the classroom. But also I’d been hearing from students something that I found fascinating, which is that during the pandemic, when a lot of classes went online in high school, cheating became kind of normal. Students found it really easy to look up answers on Google. This was, you know, pre-ChatGPT, but students found it really easy to look up answers on Google. And I think sort of cheating begat cheating. And students sort of felt like it was no longer inappropriate to cheat in their classes and that carried over into the college setting. And I’d also heard, interestingly, that some campuses were wrestling with whether or not their honor codes had any meaning anymore.
Jack Stripling I have a confession to make to you, Beth. Before we started today, I went to ChatGPT and I asked it to write a podcast introduction for me, and I gave it a few parameters. I said the introduction should be about how much college students are cheating and what that means for professors. I said it should make the audience want to listen. It should be roughly 150 words and it should introduce you, my guest as a Chronicle reporter who recently wrote about this issue. I didn’t love the first draft, I will admit. So I gave it a couple of additional prompts. But what I read at the top of the show is essentially what ChatGPT spit out in a draft to me. So I guess my question is, did I cheat this morning?
Beth McMurtrie It depends on your own internal academic integrity, I suppose. If you wanted to do something that was authentic to you, then yes, you absolutely cheated. If you didn’t care really who was the original source of the material and you knew that you could vet it then no, it wasn’t cheating. It was up to you.
Jack Stripling I see. So this is a little bit of a personal decision?
Beth McMurtrie Sure. And you also didn’t have a teacher telling you whether or not you could use AI to write your introduction.
Jack Stripling That’s true. You didn’t create any rules here and frankly, I’m the host of this podcast, so I get to make them.
Beth McMurtrie You can do what you want.
Jack Stripling I decided that this is acceptable. So what do we know about student cheating? How common is it?
Beth McMurtrie Well, it’s a really interesting topic. I have talked to a few academic integrity experts about the sort of explosion in AI cheating and the social norming of cheating. And none of this really surprises them. History shows that students have always cheated. Cheating is normal. It’s natural. It’s part of human behavior. We know, for example, that about 60 percent of students admit to cheating. A lot of cheating data, I should note, is self-reported, right? So we don’t really actually have a good handle on what percentage of students cheat. We know that they cheat in different ways. The International Center for Academic Integrity has some interesting data on its website. So, a 2020 survey broke down the different types of cheating that students do. About 30% of them admitted to cheating on exams. Another 25% admitted to using unauthorized resources. You know, things like Wikipedia or YouTube, I guess today that would also include ChatGPT. About 28% said they worked with somebody else on an assignment and another 15% said they paraphrased or copied a few sentences. So we can see that there are different ways in which students cheat. We also know there’s been a lot of research on why students cheat, and it’s rarely an ethical or a moral dilemma. It’s usually very situational. And I think that’s important to think about, because what that means is it’s not like you’re a cheater or you’re not a cheater, right? It’s often an in the moment decision. And some of the decisions include: You’ve got too much to do and you’ve run out of time and you need some help, and maybe you get that help online, maybe you get that help from a friend. Another situation could be you feel like you’re drowning. You don’t understand the assignment. You don’t know what to do. And so again, you used help. You might not think the assignment is very valuable. You might consider it busywork or a waste of time, and you don’t feel like your professor cares and therefore you don’t care. There are a host of reasons why students cheat. You might be helping out a friend who’s struggling in a class. When you ask students do they value academic integrity and honesty, they say yes. But they also, many of them, cheat. And I think that’s just sort of an interesting human phenomenon.
Jack Stripling Yeah, an interesting contradiction. I think the perception is that technology is a big part of the reason that we might see an increase in cheating. Is it just technology, though?
Beth McMurtrie Well, I think there are a number of things that have made cheating feel like it’s gotten worse. So the reasons that people cheat have sort of stayed the same over the decades. But some things that have changed are technology. It is a lot easier to cheat right now. So before generative AI, there were a lot of websites that would bill themselves as offering homework help. But in reality, you could upload your problems, you could even upload your test questions, and you would get instant answers. So students were using those homework help websites for cheating. And there were also apps like Photomath that have been around for years where you can literally take a picture of a math problem, and it not only gives you the answer, it tells you how to solve the problem. So if your homework, if your teacher required you to map out your steps, Photmath can do that. So my larger point here is that tech has just made it easier and quicker to do that. Another change has been students are under a lot more pressure to succeed. And this is something that it seems to be a constant theme in Chronicle stories and in the podcast. You know, the stakes are higher for students. They feel like they can’t screw up. They can’t fail. And so when you have this increased pressures and the increased availability of opportunities to cheat, you have what seems to be a cheating epidemic.
Jack Stripling Yeah. So much pressure, and I think that’s an age old story, right? The stressed out student who maybe compromises a little bit on an ethical standard because the stakes are so high. And it’s remarkable to me that students are talking so openly about cheating. You’ve talked to students. Some of these surveys are anonymous, but some students are going on the record talking about it. How do they justify cheating?
Beth McMurtrie Well, yeah, I’ve talked to a few students and I’ve talked to a lot of professors who talk to their students who they have caught cheating. And the students tend to say a lot of the same sorts of things. There are a lot of students now, for example, who are working close to full time and taking a full course load. School is not the priority. It may be a priority, but not the priority. And often they make calculated decisions about which courses are the lowest priority. A lot of them are these gen ed courses, and those are the ones where we tend to see a lot of cheating. A lot of the courses where they don’t necessarily consider the work valuable or relevant to their education. Another cause is panic and stress and a lack of faith in their own abilities. I’ve talked to professors who say to their students, you know, if you just put in a little bit of time, you could have gotten a B on this assignment. But the students actually don’t believe that they’re capable of doing the work, and they are coming into college with weaker skills thanks to pandemic era learning. So another thing is what professors are hearing and what students are saying is that students feel like anything less than an A is a failure. This may date way back to high school where you have to jump through so many hoops and have the perfect resume to get into the college that you want to get into. And so it’s all about these externalities, what you look like on paper rather than what you know. And so that’s a motivation for cheating to get the best possible grade. And then there’s the “everybody does it” excuse that sort of, the social norming. When you see people around you cheating, sometimes you feel like you have to cheat too just to keep up. And then sometimes you feel like, well, what does it matter? Everybody’s cheating. And so I’ll cheat, too.
Jack Stripling You know something you mentioned that’s striking to me is the lack of confidence that might come from a reliance on these tools. I kind of notoriously in my family have a horrible sense of direction. And so I was very excited when GPS came on the scene. But before that, you know, I kind of had to muddle through and find my way around places. And now I don’t think that I would ever go anywhere without turning it on. Once you start using a technology that feels like it’s necessary, it’s kind of hard to quit it.
Beth McMurtrie I really agree. And I think this is what’s alarming a lot of professors, especially, again, with those first and second year students who are coming in. If you lack faith in say your ability to write or to communicate or even to understand what you’re reading, I mean, we know that there’s a crisis in reading comprehension. This tool that spits out grammatically perfect and clean writing, you are going to think that that is the better and more practical option, that that option makes more sense to you than to try to bungle your way through an essay. And what I hear from a lot of professors is they’ve started to say explicitly to their students, I would rather see your misspellings, your complicated writing, your rough draft, if it’s your own ideas, than to see something that is not authentically you. That’s what I care about.
Jack Stripling And we might miss out on some of these beautiful imperfections. I don’t know like, if you fed William S. Burroughs into ChatGPT, I’m sure he would spit out something a lot less interesting.
Beth McMurtrie Exactly. And as you know, Joan Didion said, I write to know what I think. And professors are trying to convince students that it’s the act of writing that fuels your thinking. And if you outsource your writing, you are never developing your critical thinking skills. And that’s a real battle that they’re facing in their classrooms because these students actually believe these tools are better at doing these things than they are.
Jack Stripling I think another battle we’re facing is even defining cheating. We talked about my little ruse of plugging in a request to ChatGPT for the introduction of this podcast. And there may be debate about whether that was dishonest. Does anyone even agree on what cheating is anymore?
Beth McMurtrie Well, I think you raise a really interesting and complicated question. So I think there is not agreement on what some kinds of cheating are. So plagiarism, for example, is a really, really murky area, right? Like, we know that you can’t lift entire paragraphs or sentences, but paraphrasing and quoting and sourcing and citing can get really confusing for students if professors and teachers don’t spell out exactly what plagiarism is. And AI is a form of plagiarism. But students don’t always think about it that way because they might plug in a prompt of their own. They might mess around with the writing and then sand it down or refine it in a way that it’s part their thinking and part the computer. We see commercials everywhere where people are using AI to do things smarter and quicker, right. So in that sense, what is allowable and what is cheating is really confusing, especially when, if you go to your English class first period, and the professor says absolutely no AI at all. And you go to your marketing class after lunch and they say, hey, we’re going to start using ChatGPT to write a marketing campaign for this soap. I mean, what are you supposed to think as a student of what’s appropriate? We know, you know, as adults that things are situational, but 17, 18, 19, that’s a real struggle to try to sort of sort out for yourself. And you come up with your own opinions, too, based on what you see in the world around you, which is a lot of blending of AI and human intelligence.
Jack Stripling And lots of mixed messaging around whether this is a miraculous development or the end of the world. I’m curious how this is affecting professors in the classroom who are probably having to make up rules as they go along. Are they overwhelmed by what they see as cheating?
Beth McMurtrie Well, I should say that even though we’ve been talking about cheating with AI and a lot of professors feeling overwhelmed by it, this is not happening in every classroom for sure. What I’m hearing is that it’s less prevalent in discussion based classes and small seminars and higher level courses where you’re really trying to apply your knowledge. Project based courses, any course where, you know, students and professors are kind of working together closely and seriously on a topic. I think where it does tend to be happening more is in those introductory courses, required courses, maybe a one off course, you’ve got to fulfill your language requirement; I hear that, you know, cheating happens a lot in language. Also, those gateway courses that you absolutely have to pass if you want to get into your major. And we’ve talked a lot about AI, but there’s other forms of cheating in STEM. You know, I know Stanford came out with a report recently that said that they’re seeing most of their cheating in these really high stakes STEM courses. And traditionally, that’s where a lot of cheating has taken place, right? Where it’s kind of all or nothing or you’re graded on a curve or you can’t get to the next level without getting at least, you know, a B in that course. So its different types of courses, but it is certainly not everywhere.
Jack Stripling Yeah, and some of these courses, I’m sure, can feel very arbitrary to students and so maybe their heart’s not in it to begin with. Maybe that’s part of the justification.
Beth McMurtrie Yeah. And that’s, that’s what I hear from students that there’s, there’s really, if they do not care about the course they have, well some of them, have no qualms about just Googling the answers to something that they considered a waste of time.
Jack Stripling This class is a joke anyway.
Beth McMurtrie Yeah, absolutely. And that goes back, right? It goes back to when you and I were in college. People, you know, they cheated off their friends or they found some other way to get information that was unauthorized.
Jack Stripling I’m curious to go into a classroom a little bit. I know you talk to professors in your reporting on this issue. Tell me a little bit about what professors are encountering and how they’re reacting to it.
Beth McMurtrie So let me tell you about this one professor who I talked to, Amy Clukey, she is an associate professor of English at the University of Louisville. And I came across Clukey through Twitter. She had been teaching some general education English courses. So one of these required courses that we’ve been talking about. She teaches both in-person and online. And she just felt like she had been seeing an army of student cheating, as she put it. And so in her Twitter thread, she talked about how she felt like she was a human plagiarism detector, right? And that she was spending so much time just trying to figure out what was authentic student writing. So I called her up and we had a long conversation about this. And her story was that she had been away for a lot of 2023, and she had been hearing from her colleagues that AI was really flooding their classrooms. But initially she wasn’t worried. She’s like, look, I’m going to do interesting and creative assignments and assessments for my students. Yeah, some of them are going to cheat, but you know, not the majority and everything will be okay. And what she found was that students were cheating in all sorts of ways. I mean, she might ask them a really simple question on a discussion board, like tell me how you revise your papers, something that might take three minutes. And she would get back all of these formulaic responses about, well, there are many factors that go into the revision process. And it took her a while to figure out that this was AI. At first, she was just puzzled by the weird formality or the off topic answers.
Jack Stripling So AI has a style, a sort of detectable style.
Beth McMurtrie Yes, there are certain phrases and words that come up. It’s oddly formal. And like a lot of professors, she knows exactly how undergraduates typically sound when they’re writing, and they do not sound like ChatGPT. And also she never thought for a second that some really simple, again, basic, kind of tell me how you did this or write an essay, you know give me your thoughts on this reading, would prompt somebody to outsource it to AI. And she started really cracking down on her students. And she recalled this one episode that happened just a few weeks ago where she emailed a student and she was like, look, I know you wrote this with AI, and if you do it again, I’m going to fail you, so don’t do it again. And the student wrote back an email and said, You know, I’m really sorry. I take academic integrity very seriously and I’ll do better. And the student’s very next assignment was riddled with AI. So Clukey thought, well, what if I plugged a question into ChatGPT that said, my professor accused me of plagiarism. How should I respond? And the response echoed almost exactly what the student had written to her. So basically what we have is a student using AI to write an apology for using AI.
Jack Stripling That is remarkable.
Beth McMurtrie It’s pretty meta. And so she, you know, she is really worried about her students, too. I mean, and again, I hear this a lot from professors: they like their students. They do not think they are unethical or bad people. They understand the pressures that they’re under. Her students are first gen. Her students work a lot and take full course loads, and she tries to sit down with her students when she can and say, look, I can show you how I know that you’re cheating. Talk to me about what’s going on. And they will tell her that it’s just not a priority for them. Sometimes their parents even say to them, don’t worry about that English class. You know, just focus on your calc class because you know you want to get into med school. So it’s almost like they’re giving their kids permission to cheat. And again, the same things we were talking about earlier, that her students are really insecure. They come in with really low levels of reading. She was talking about how she had assigned War of the Worlds to her students, which is something that eighth graders often read. And they were telling her it was too hard for them. So they feel unequipped to do some of the work that she’s asking. They also don’t value the work. They have other things they have to get done. And it’s just as she said, they’re being set up for failure.
Jack Stripling This is, has remarkable overlap with the conversation you and I had about reading and I would recommend people check out that episode Is Reading Over For Gen Z?, because it gets at a lot of this conversation about why students lack confidence and ability when it comes to reading long and complex texts, much less War of the Worlds, which as you say, would be a lower level text. What does Clukey do about this when she sees this type of cheating in her class?
Beth McMurtrie Well, one of the first things she did when she kind of realized it had reached kind of critical proportions, is she took an entire class session to talk to her students, to really do what, you know, again, the academic integrity experts say to do, the teaching experts say to do. She’s like, look, you guys, you could probably cheat your way through college, but if you want to go to grad school, you can’t cheat your way through the GRE, right? So at some point it’s going to catch up with you. Or you could cheat your way through getting that job interview by having ChatGPT fill out your application or write your cover letter. But what are you going to do once you get into the interview? She talked about how it was demoralizing. She talked about how it was important to their classmates to come prepared because if they’re spouting something that doesn’t really make a lot of sense because they got it from AI, and the AI was wrong, that their classmates are going to feel puzzled and confused and dispirited. You know, she talked about how she was teaching them transferable skills. She’s like, okay, maybe you don’t like this English class, but reading and writing and critical thinking, they’re everywhere. They’re on Tiktok. They’re going to be in your future jobs. You need to know how to do this stuff. And she said she saw the students nodding along. But then she put out one of her mid-semester evaluations, kind of a check in, how are the classes going? And several students said, I really don’t like the fact that she wasted an entire class session talking about cheating. And she still got assignments in that were full of AI.
Jack Stripling Wow. Well, you mentioned that AI sort of has a style, maybe even a detectable style. I am curious how good it is at this. Can ChatGPT write a good college-level paper?
Beth McMurtrie Well, it depends, right? So it depends on what the professor is asking of the student. It depends how widely known the course material is on the Internet, you know, because ChatGPT just sucks up what’s on the internet or has sucked up what’s on the internet and spits it back out. So if it’s an obscure essay or poem, no. If it’s some really complicated thing where you’re supposed to compare and contrast several pieces of work or dig into, you know, a few lines of a poem, it’s probably not going to do that. But if it’s more like, you know, compare these two novels that have been around and have been written about extensively, it can certainly do a passable grade. And we have published essays from people, including, I think there was one from a Harvard student, right, who did a test, and ChatGPT did a serviceable job in a number of college assignments. And that’s part of the problem. And, you know, people warn that AI is only going to get better. That, you know, the more sophisticated the prompt and the more you iterate, I mean, there are professors who love AI because they think of it as an extension of their own brain. It helps them brainstorm and it helps them collaborate. So there are very sophisticated ways in which you can use AI. So of course, in some basic level, in some introductory courses, it’s going to do a perfectly reasonable job of writing an essay.
Jack Stripling And I think we should say we’re two years into this ChatGPT experiment. That’s when this came out. And I remember fiddling with it in the beginning and finding that, particularly if I asked it about a novel, a lot of times it would get things wrong about what happened in a novel, for example. I think the most fun I had with it was asking, can you write the theme to The Smurfs show in Bob Dylan’s voice? And it did an incredible job with that, actually. I highly recommend people try that. But there were a lot of inaccuracies when I asked it about things like, you know, what happened in a Nabokov novel or something like that. And as you say, this is going to get better and better and iterated upon. So I would think it would become even more difficult for faculty to detect when it happens. How easy is it now for professors to spot an AI generated assignment?
Beth McMurtrie Well, I think it’s easy to spot, but it’s hard to prove. And what I mean by that is if you are even a remotely seasoned professor, you understand what an 18 or 19 year old voice sounds like, right? And I hear this all the time: You know, I just knew it just didn’t sound natural or normal. I will say there’s one giant exception, which is if you’re teaching an online class, particularly an online, asynchronous class, those professors really struggle to even understand what their student’s authentic voice is if they are using AI from day one. But let’s just say you’re talking about an in-person class where maybe you do some baseline writing in class and you get a sense of your student’s voice, right? And so you know that things are kind of going off the rails when you get these particularly oddly worded essays. So they kind of see that something’s wrong, but you have to do your due diligence, right? You can’t — well, I suppose you could — but most people don’t want to just come out and say, I know you used AI, I’m, you know, giving you a zero on this. So they spend a lot of time doing detective work. I mean, Clukey says she now spends about 20 hours a week reading students’ papers, grading them, checking up on them. Now, there are also tools, these plagiarism detection tools or these AI detection tools that a lot of teachers in high school and professors use. The most popular one probably is Turnitin. But they give you — they don’t say this is definitely AI. What they say is there’s an 80% likelihood that AI was used or 20% likelihood, and they might catch a few phrases. But even there, there’s a chance of a false positive. We know, for example, that students or people for whom English is a second language, who tend to write in a more formulaic way, they can get flagged more frequently, for example. Again, it’s really hard to absolutely prove that somebody used AI.
Jack Stripling That’s interesting. And I think that when we think about old school plagiarism detectives, even before Turnitin, you know, you went to the source material. You saw that a student had pulled direct passages from another published work. This is so different. It’s being generated on the fly and makes detection, I would think, a lot more difficult.
Beth McMurtrie Yeah. I mean, so there’s something called like a text spinner where you could take AI-generated work, put it through the spinner, it swaps out a bunch of words, and then that’s what you turn in. And so, I mean, there’s a, it’s an arms race because turnitin and other apps have now come up with add ons that supposedly can detect these kinds of things.
Jack Stripling Laundering your AI-generated paper.
Beth McMurtrie Yes. Exactly.
Jack Stripling So we’ve been talking a lot about Professor Clukey, who’s at the University of Louisville, which is a public research university. But I’m curious whether this is happening in all types of institutions. What have you found in that regard?
Beth McMurtrie Well, the short answer is yes. I mean, I think we cannot tell ourselves that this is just a problem among underprepared students or students who are working full time or students who don’t care about college. It’s happening at elite institutions, it’s happening at Ivy League institutions, liberal arts colleges, large public flagships, and many, many places that you might not expect.
Jack Stripling Stick around. We’ll be back in a minute.
BREAK
Jack Stripling Beth, we’ve been talking about the prevalence of cheating and how hard it is to stop. One of the places you focused your reporting on of late is Middlebury College. Tell me about Middlebury and why it’s important to this larger story.
Beth McMurtrie So Middlebury is a highly selective private college in Vermont. It admits only about 12 or 13% of applicants. It has an honor code which has been around for generations. It’s the kind of place that does not proctor exams. It relies on students to maintain their own academic integrity. It relies on students to report others if they know that they’re violating that honor code. So there are a lot of elements here that would seem to set the campus up for success. But a lot of people say that the honor code isn’t working. I talked to this one student, Hannah Sayre, who wrote an opinion piece in the campus paper last year about the blatant cheating that she had witnessed during one of her midterm exams. Students had phones on their laps. They were copying down answers on their screens. They were showing their exams to each other. They were talking out loud in class without any fear of repercussion. And that was because exams are not proctored and students are not turning each other in, even though the honor code requires them. And then Sayre was saying to me that she imagined that there were a lot of students who felt like she did during that exam where they thought, well, you know, this is ridiculous. I can’t believe my peers are getting away with this. And now I’m in a really tough spot where I feel like I need to cheat and break the rules just to compete with my classmates academically. And she had hoped that proctoring would level the playing field. The thing is, Sayre’s not alone. As it turns out, an honor code review committee basically reached the same conclusion. They found that the honor code isn’t working. Students regularly violate the honor code. According to a campus survey, 65% of students admitted to violating the honor code last year. They are not reporting their classmates. There’s widespread confusion around the adjudication process to the point where professors don’t even want to use the system. Professors are really frustrated that they cannot proctor exams because they know cheating is happening in some classes. And generative AI just adds a whole other layer of complexity to this situation. And as the committee’s interim report put it this spring, the honor code has ceased to be a meaningful element of learning and living at Middlebury for most students.
Jack Stripling So that’s what the report said. What do students and professors at Middlebury say?
Beth McMurtrie I talked to a few students and professors at Middlebury to try to really dig into what was happening there. I mean, the committee’s report laid out a lot of the things that we have been talking about, the pressure to get an A, this feeling that you had to be perfect, this confusion over what counts as authorized or unauthorized use of AI, the lack of time management and so on. I talked to this one professor, though, Amanda Gregg. She is an associate professor of economics. She’s taught at Middlebury since 2015. I can’t say that the report surprised her. She said it saddened her. She feels like something has broken at Middlebury and she herself is trying to wrestle with what it means. She talks to her students a lot about academic integrity. And she told me this one story about how she was having a dinner with a group of undergraduates. And this one student said, you know, without any sort of embarrassment, you know, of course I’m going to cheat in a class that really doesn’t mean anything. This sort of pain in the butt, whatever gen ed course, that is not particularly relevant. And he turned to her and he said, wouldn’t you, Professor Gregg? And she said, no, I wouldn’t. You know, and she talked about how when she was an undergraduate, there were major social sanctions for cheating. And she said, to be blunt, I wouldn’t be friends with somebody who cheated. And she said her students were shocked when she said that. They really were surprised that she felt that way and that she felt so strongly.
Jack Stripling It sounds like what you’re describing here is a major cultural shift, that there were guardrails that existed just within the social circles of people that have evaporated as more and more people cheat, as it becomes more and more normalized. If that’s the case, how is it changing what professors are doing in class?
Beth McMurtrie Yeah, I think the term guardrails is a great one to use because what it suggests is that you are helping somebody to do the right thing, to move in the right direction. I think this is something that professors are realizing slowly in some cases, but this is something that professors are starting to put in place. So what the immediate effect, say, of the post-ChatGPT world was to remove take-home exams or online exams that didn’t have any sort of proctoring. A lot of professors have just ditched discussion posts, which are very easily cheatable. Or they move testing into class. Or when they’re students, when they do ask their students to write essays, they have them do it in Google Docs and then ask them to show them a version history so they can see how they put the essay together. Or there are new tools within learning management systems that do something similar. And in fact, Amanda Gregg says she does a lot of those things now, that she’s started to put in these checks and balances to make sure her students act appropriately.
Jack Stripling So a lot of the examples you’ve been providing seem like they have to do with essays and writing. Are we seeing this in other disciplines, though?
Beth McMurtrie Yes, we’re seeing comparable things in, say, STEM classes. I have talked to a computer science professor a few weeks ago who said that he’s doing a lot of the basic coding work, having students do a lot of basic coding work, in class. So he knows that they know the fundamentals. And then he gives them projects to do outside of class that are sort of iterative and build on themselves. And so this is another approach where you create scaffolded projects, where students can learn the foundational skills and formula and all sorts of other things that they need to learn in the class that, you know, it’s they’ve learned it accurately and authentically. And then you send them out to do these more complicated projects. So whether that’s chemistry or biology or history or philosophy, there are variations of that happening in classrooms across the country.
Jack Stripling A lot of what I’m hearing from professors is that they want students to do more work in class — that that’s a way of really seeing that they did it and not ChatGPT. But that feels like a fundamental shift in where higher education has been headed over the last 10 to 20 years, which is, we’re going to make class time a lot more valuable. We’re not going to have students doing busy work in classes because that’s a waste of this precious time. Is cheating upending all of this transformation of what classroom time is for?
Beth McMurtrie Yeah, in some instances it is. I know, for example, when I talked to Amy Clukey, she said that she’s going to have to bring essay writing and paper writing back into class. And if you think about writing a five page paper, that takes several class sessions. So that’s just less time she’s going to spend talking to her students about what they’re reading in class. So these discussion based classroom sessions are going to shrink. And we know, too, that a lot of students have test anxiety or writing by hand is not the best way, you know, for them to demonstrate their knowledge or, you know, some professors are doing oral exams, but not all students perform well in that way. So in that sense, a lot of people feel like they’re throwing out the best kinds of teaching that they have developed over the years and instituting kind of the old school in-class exams, Bluebook essays, that were really common, like in the 70s and 80s. Now, I will say that there are optimists who say, well, you know, just, if ChatGPT can do something, just give students something harder or more complicated to do. So you might do a flipped classroom where the students are supposed to do the basic studying outside of class and then come in and work on a project. Or you might do these long or complicated projects knowing that they might use AI. But again, that only works for certain types of classrooms, I think. If you don’t have those foundational skills that Clukey and her peers are trying to teach, how can you move to the next level? And that’s the frustration of some of these professors, that they want to make sure that they’re teaching the students the skills they need to do those really cool projects that they’re hoping they can get to eventually.
Jack Stripling So, Beth, I think the argument against cheating is in part that someday in your life there’s going to be a reckoning. That you’re either going to be at a job interview and look like a clown, or you’re going to submit an AI-generated paper and someone is going to accuse you of academic dishonesty and you’re going to be kicked out of school. But I wonder if the students are seeing something that we don’t, which is these tools are going to be a big part of our future whether we like it or not. And the people who are going to be successful in the next 20 years are those who master it, not those who are afraid of whether it’s a taboo that they’re breaking. What do you make of that argument?
Beth McMurtrie So let’s start by talking about the series of ads that have been showing up on TV by Apple Intelligence. One shows this guy in an office who is goofing around. He’s playing with the tape dispenser. He’s spinning around in his chair doing nothing. And then he sends an email to a coworker saying something along the lines of, Hey, I need your help on this project. And he uses Apple Intelligence to make his email sound really good, and it gets sent over to the coworker and the coworker reads it and looks over and he’s like, wow, this guy’s really smart. And the tagline is Work Smarter. And they have another one where somebody didn’t do the reading, they didn’t read the prospectus, and in a previous world they would have been called out. But the guy quickly types something into the computer. It gives him a quick summary. And the tagline is Catch Up Quick. So these people are complete slackers. They didn’t do what they were supposed to do. And Apple is saying, We’ve got your back, right? Like that is the worst possible message that I think any teacher, any professor would want their students to receive. And it is out there. It is out there in the world. And these students are receiving this message. So on the one hand, AI can do a lot of cool things and students are absolutely onto something and are probably correct to say that tech is only going to become more integrated into our lives and into our brains. And you’ve got to know how to use these tech tools if you want to get anywhere. But the small voice that seems to be shouting in the wind is from professors who say, yeah, but you have to know how to use them, which means you have to know how to think. You have to be their master. They can’t be the master of you. And if you’re that goofball in the office who just uses AI to write emails and doesn’t do anything, he’s going to get found out. Another way to say that is if AI can do your job, why does your boss need you, right? So this is the message that you’re trying to send to students and students are getting messages from each other, from their own lives, from their friends, from social media, from commercials on TV, telling them that AI can actually do a lot of the work that they don’t feel like doing. So I don’t really know how you sort all this out when you’re a young person. I just know that it’s become that much harder for academics to try to make the case that independent autonomous thought, that being a capable, thoughtful, educated, enlightened person, actually really matters and is what’s going to set you ahead in the world. I mean, we know that in the long run that is true. But in the short run, is it true? You can probably get away with a lot.
Jack Stripling I think anyone looking at this can see that certain social norms are going to change around this inevitably, that we’re going to rethink when it is and isn’t appropriate to rely on AI. But right now, we’re running an interesting experiment in higher education, where in some cases there are very clear rules and students are choosing to violate them. And that’s cheating by any definition. And I guess I worry a little bit about living in a world where no one thinks cheating is a bad thing. Does that make sense? Should I be worried about that?
Beth McMurtrie Yes, you absolutely should be worried. We should all be worried that cheating has become so normalized. And I think this is why it’s important to kind of listen to what the research has told us about why people cheat. You know, people violate their moral codes every day in ways that are large and small and often go against their own best long term interests for short term gain. So this idea that students are human and students will cheat if they can cheat, or they will cheat if they just feel pressured to cheat is a really important message that I think academia needs to really wrestle with and is wrestling with right now. And so what some colleges are really struggling with, places like Middlebury are really struggling with, is how do you get everybody back on the right track? How do you reinforce academic integrity? How do you bring it back into the daily lives of students in a meaningful way? How do you encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior? There’s this one academic integrity expert, Jason Stephens, who talked about the cheating crisis as an epidemic. And much like a health epidemic, you need many players on multiple levels working toward the same goal. It has to do with social norming, it has to do with discussing in class why you think your subject matter matters and why you want students to behave with integrity and how they should behave with integrity. It means having consequences if you do cheat, and not just keeping it in-house or giving the student a zero and hoping they do better next time. This is something Middlebury is wrestling with. This is something other colleges, I mentioned Stanford, are also wrestling with. But it does seem to me that it requires collective action and not just the action of the individual.
Jack Stripling I think some people looking at this might think that cheating would be less common if colleges punished students more frequently and more severely. To what extent are colleges going after students for this kind of thing?
Beth McMurtrie Well, it’s a good question. I mean, when you look at the actual number of cases being brought before academic integrity committees on any given campus, they typically represent a very small fraction of all students. So I think it’s fair to assume that there’s a lot more cheating going on than there are students being punished for it. And I think there are a couple of things that stand in the way of more serious enforcement, particularly around AI use. One is that cheating with AI is harder to prove because it’s not like you’re cutting and pasting from an existing document. And the other is that these campus judicial systems are often cumbersome for everyone involved. I’ve talked to professors who say that they turn a student over and then have no idea what happens next. Or they have to accumulate a ton of evidence, but then are told that it doesn’t technically prove that the student used AI. So for people like that, they might see it as more effective to just have a conversation with a student, give them a zero on the assignment, and then, you know, continue on. Also, a lot of educators fundamentally dislike a punitive approach, especially if they fear that the punishment is disproportionate to the crime. But of course, if students know that enforcement or punishment is rare, they’re less likely to worry about the consequences of getting caught. I mean, that’s just human nature. And I think there’s a really interesting conversation about whether you make the enforcement and the punishment more rigorous and onerous so you can scare the students straight or you make it more educational so they’re willing to admit their guilt and then they can learn from their mistakes. I know at Middlebury, for example, the recommendations of that honor code review committee reflect this duality. They want faculty members to recommit themselves to using the honor system, which they have been under using, but they also want to use student violations as a teaching moment, not just a way to mete out punishment.
Jack Stripling It sounds like professors who are trying to hold the line on this are up against an almost impossible environment. There are students who don’t think this is a big deal. They even have parents who maybe don’t think this is a big deal. And they have technology that is getting ever more sophisticated in evading detection. Does your reporting give you any sense of whether this is a solvable problem?
Beth McMurtrie When I asked Amy Clukey that question, she brought up this W.B. Yeats play about the Irish mythical hero Cú Chulainn. And he battles this warrior. And after he wins and he slaughters the warrior, it turns out that it was his own son. And he goes mad with grief and horror, and he runs into the ocean and he starts slashing with his sword at the waves, trying to fight the ocean. And she said, this is kind of what it feels like right now. Not to be overly dramatic, but this is kind of what it feels like right now. And unless the university starts to take this seriously, she said, unless there is collective action, it really is up to individual faculty members to take care of it in their own classrooms. And what they’re doing is fighting against the waves, fighting against the ocean.
Jack Stripling Well, that’s a sort of dark image to end on, Beth. Um, I kind of want to lighten the mood, and I’m wondering if ChatGPT can help us here. Can you give me a minute? So I’m going to ask ChatGPT, “How do I end a conversation in a happy way that took a dark turn?” Okay. Here’s how ChatGPT says we should end this, Beth. “Hey, I know that got pretty heavy, and I really appreciate you sharing that with me. It’s important to talk about tough things, but I also want to make sure we’re both feeling okay. Let’s think about something positive to wrap this up. What’s something good that happened to you recently or something you’re looking forward to?”
Beth McMurtrie Wow, that was so superficial. I think I’ll stick with the authentic, depressing ending to this podcast.
Jack Stripling Fair enough. Well, Beth, I always enjoy talking to you with my real voice and our real thoughts, and thank you for coming here and doing that.
Beth McMurtrie Thanks, Jack. It was a pleasure.
Jack Stripling College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, Laura Krantz, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.