Many College Students Already Have Well-Formed Cheating Habits – That, Not AI, Is the Real Problem

Yves here. The findings of this article, that most young people today will admit to cheating, are disturbing on many levels. First, it suggests that many if not most of them view school as an act of affirmation, as opposed to ability, to achieve. Second, it creates a critical situation, in that if the student does not cheat, he is disadvantaged by competition. Third, it points to a widespread decline in moral values. No wonder the US has dropped in the corruption perception ratings. It looks well-authorized.

By Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law and Political Science, Amherst College. Originally published on The Conversation

My colleague and I recently had a conversation with a group of talented, interested students who had just finished their first year of college about using artificial intelligence as a research tool.

I asked what might seem like an unrelated question: “How many of you cheated in high school?”

Most of the students raised their hands. Perhaps comforted by the realization that there were many of them, they seemed neither shy nor embarrassed.

I am not the first to ask my students that question. In each case, the results have been very similar.

When students enter college classes, many have experienced cheating and think that it makes sense in some cases to do so, due to things like the pressure to succeed.

Let’s be clear: AI has not created an intellectual dishonesty problem for this generation of students.

Alas, the problem long predates AI and runs much deeper.

Cheat Pipe

Most college students are honest and hardworking. But by the time some students get to college, they have become accustomed to poor academic behavior in America’s high schools.

As Eric Anderman, an educational psychologist, wrote in 2018: “Academic cheating is rampant in all types of American high schools. Data from one large national survey showed that 51% of high school students admit to having cheated on an exam.”

Another study on high school cheating found in 2020 that 64% of 70,000 high school students nationwide admitted to cheating on a test, and 58% admitted to cheating. About 95% of high school students, he said, “participated in some form of cheating, whether it was taking an exam, cheating or copying homework.”

And at one high school in Pennsylvania, 90 out of 100 respondents to a 2018 school survey “admitted to having cheated on homework at least once.”

One of the respondents put it simply: “Everybody cheats.”

Students can cheat for different reasons.

They may feel unprepared for a test or paper, but still want to get good grades and get accepted into a competitive college.

They may see that cheating is wrong, but they justify it by saying that everyone else is doing the same thing, or that they have teachers who are not doing their job well. Some students may not fully understand what cheating means in different situations or think that what they are doing counts as cheating.

This type of thinking can allow students who sometimes cheat to not think of themselves as cheaters.

Sociologists Gresham Sykes and David Matza call this tendency “strategies of neutrality.” This means that people use their internal ways of seeing the world to justify acting in a way that they know is wrong.

Looking Another Way

A 2020 study of 840 college students found that 32% had cheated in some way on tests.

College professors like myself may be tempted to look the other way if we suspect a student is cheating, or try to solve the problem of cheating by changing the way we assess students.

The Wall Street Journal, for example, reported in 2025 that faculty across the country are abandoning writing assignments, which students can do with AI, and returning to classroom tests and exams.

All colleges and universities have policies against plagiarism and other forms of intellectual dishonesty.

To give one example, Harvard’s policy states “Cheating on tests or problem sets, plagiarizing or misrepresenting someone else’s ideas or language as one’s own, misrepresentation, or any other instance of academic dishonesty violates the standards of our community, as well as the standards of the wider world of learning and media.”

Students who violate the plagiarism rules at Harvard and elsewhere may face consequences ranging from failing the class to expulsion. But many teachers do not report incidents of cheating to administrators who are responsible for enforcing those rules and issuing punishments.

Few colleges have developed an academic integrity curriculum that treats cheating as a practice and works to combat it during a student’s four years of college education.

I think, like any bad habit, students can only be weaned from cheating a little, with a support system and clear, severe consequences when caught.

Cheating in College

Getting an idea of ​​the extent of the cheating problem on college campuses is not difficult.

In February 2026, for example, Harvard graduate student Matthew Tobin published an opinion piece in the Harvard Crimson titled “Plagiarize or Perish.”

He cited a 2024 Harvard Crimson study showing 47% of 850 students surveyed said they had cheated.

Tobin wrote that while some people say that cheating is the result of “today’s students not participating in school or using artificial intelligence,” other issues are at play. Cheating and academic misconduct “have been frequent at Harvard for longer than these problems,” he wrote.

Reported incidents of academic misconduct increased at Ohio State University by 57% between 2014 and 2018. This is probably an underestimate, as many cases of academic misconduct are not reported or investigated.

Charlie McLaughlin, an Oberlin student, published an op-ed in the student newspaper in May 2026 criticizing the college’s decision to change the honor code charter so professors could proctor exams, meaning they supervise students while they take exams.

“Changing this policy is a clear sign that this school no longer trusts us to learn to be adults with integrity,” McLaughlin wrote. “That’s sad. Maybe, it makes sense too. Maybe, we don’t deserve that trust. That’s even more sad.”

Princeton recently abandoned its 133-year ban on proctoring exams “to address growing concerns about violations of academic integrity, including the increased use of AI.”

Teacher’s Problem

I don’t think of my students as cheaters, and I don’t want to look at them with the kind of suspicion that turns teaching into police work. But it is my job and the college where I teach to recognize that our students need a lot of help to develop good study habits.

Unless colleges acknowledge these facts, I believe they have little chance of stopping the rise of cheating.

Faculty can begin by integrating discussions of intellectual integrity into all of their courses and engaging students to think about who they want to be — and whether they want to live their lives cross-cutting corners and play the game. Only then can colleges hope to build what Tobin calls “a commitment to teaching integrity to (our) students.”