It’s no secret that academic dishonesty is rampant at colleges and universities across the country—around the world, really. Indeed, cheating, to use the old-fashioned term, has been on the rise for decades, beginning with the arrival of the internet in the 1990s, and it took a quantum leap at the start of this decade.
According to Times Higher Education, the University of Waterloo in Belgium observed a 146 percent increase in cheating cases following the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020-21, while at the University of Houston, the number of cases doubled during that same time period. Those are just two examples of many. Meanwhile, Psychology Today reported that “studies consistently put the level of self-reported cheating among undergraduates between 50 percent and 70 percent.”
So there’s no question that students are cheating, and cheating a lot. Far more than they used to, in fact, and perhaps far more than many of us suspected. The question is, why? Most of the literature paints students as basically victims of circumstance, pinning the blame on lockdowns, pressure from parents, peers, and professors, online classes, and artificial intelligence (AI).
But I believe students cheat for far simpler reasons: Because they are inclined to do so and because they can.
[RELATED: Can Collective Proof Help Detect AI Cheating?]
Sure, the internet has made it easier for them. The proliferation of online classes, especially since 2020, has also been a problem. It’s an open secret in academia that it’s much easier for students to cheat online than in face-to-face classes. And there’s no question AI has made things much worse, in part, because it’s almost impossible to prove, definitively, that a student used AI on an assignment.
In my view, however, a more significant issue, one that’s rarely discussed, is that students in general simply aren’t as honest as they used to be. Tools like Google and ChatGPT are just that: tools. Blaming them for students’ cheating is like blaming guns for school shootings. Someone has to pull the trigger. Or, in this case, enter the prompt.
One reason for the decline in honesty on college campuses is the increased number of foreign students. I have come to the realization, as I deal with more and more of such students each semester, that honesty for honesty’s sake is mostly a Western, Judeo-Christian value. Other cultures tend to take a more transactional approach. As Helen Andrews, a senior editor at the American Conservative, told the American Economic Forum in 2022, “fraud and cheating and academic dishonesty are regarded very differently in China and India than they are in the United States.” A recent study found that honesty is less prevalent in collectivist societies, while the Islamic concept of “taqiyya” permits adherents to deceive non-believers.
Thus, many foreign students appear to believe that, in most human interactions, what is permissible is whatever they can get away with. If you can gain an advantage by lying or cheating—what Westerners would regard as cheating—then good for you.
But such dishonesty is hardly limited to foreign students. Today’s American students aren’t as honest as their predecessors, either. Long gone are the days of the Golden Rule and the Boy Scout Oath. Modern students have become cynical, jaded by what they see on social media and television, not to mention the relentless gaslighting of public officials on issues like social distancing, masks, and the COVID-19 jabs. They see a proven serial plagiarist become president of Harvard University and, even after her offenses come to light, be shunted into a cozy sinecure at an exorbitant salary.
Everyone else seems to be lying to gain an advantage, students apparently think to themselves. Why not them?
However, there’s another key reason colleges and universities are seeing an explosion in academic dishonesty: They aren’t doing much to discourage it. Quite the opposite. They make it as tedious, onerous, nerve-wracking, and potentially career-threatening as possible for faculty members to report incidents. The onus is on professors to prove any allegation beyond a shadow of a doubt, and heaven help them if they can’t make a case that would stand up in court.
Recently, I received an email from my university’s upper administration outlining the steps faculty members must take if they wish to accuse a student of academic dishonesty. I won’t cover the entire list here, but suffice it to say it would take hours to report a single incident and collect the supporting documents. The instructions were worded in such a way as to actively discourage professors from reporting, with thinly veiled warnings about what could happen if we failed to dot every i and cross every t.
I thought to myself, as I read that email, it’s just not worth it, except perhaps in the most egregious cases. And even then, faculty members should think twice before jumping down that particular administrative rabbit hole. It could potentially cost them their job. No doubt that is precisely how they want us to react. And I strongly suspect my institution is not alone in this; I imagine it’s nearly universal.
So what is to be done? AI is here to stay, and college administrators are unlikely to back off their soft-on-cheating, blame-the-professor approach to cheating, both for liability reasons and because they’d rather not deal with such thorny issues. They just want students to finish so they can brag about their graduation rates. No doubt students know this, or at least sense it intuitively, thus rendering most boilerplate “academic honesty” statements effectively toothless.
[RELATED: MSU Brushed Ed School Dean’s Plagiarism Under the Rug]
That means it’s up to us as professors, not so much to police cheating as to teach basic values, including why it’s wrong to cheat. Evidently, most students aren’t getting that anywhere else. We can also, as I outlined in an earlier piece for Minding the Campus, craft our assignments to make them as plagiarism- and AI-resistant as possible and revise our grading policies to reward originality when we perceive it. And we must persist in attempting to persuade students of the benefits of doing their own work and thereby acquiring the relevant skills.
We’re not going to reach every student. We might not even reach most. But we can provide high-quality instruction for those who actually want to learn and are willing to do what it takes. They are the ones who will ultimately lead society forward, while the cheaters and shortcut-takers languish in low-paying, menial jobs in which AI does most of the work.
Ultimately, that is their problem, not ours. If students choose to cheat, violating basic tenets of integrity and professionalism, they might not pay the price immediately, in your class or mine. But they will, inevitably, at some point, pay the price.
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