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

Yves here. The finding in this article, that a lot of young people today will ‘fess up to cheating, is disturbing on multiple levels. First, it suggests that many if not most regard school as an exercise in credential, as opposed to skill, acquisition. Second, it creates a criminogenic environment, in that if a student does not cheat, he is competitively disadvantaged. Third, it points to a wide-spread decline in ethics. No wonder the US has dropped in corruption perception rankings. It looks to be well warranted.

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

My colleagues and I recently spoke with a group of talented, interesting students who just completed their first year of college about using artificial intelligence as a research tool.

I asked what must have seemed 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 they had plenty of company, they seemed neither embarrassed nor ashamed.

This is not the first time I’ve asked my students that question. On each occasion, the results have been pretty much the same.

By the time students end up in college classrooms, many have encountered cheating and think it makes sense in some cases to do so, because of factors like pressure to succeed.

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

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

The Cheating Pipeline

Many college students are honest and hardworking. But by the time some students get to college, they have become accustomed to academic misconduct in American high schools.

As Eric Anderman, a scholar of educational psychology, wrote in 2018: “Academic cheating is prevalent throughout all types of American high schools. Data from one large national study indicated that 51% of high school students admit that they have cheated during a test.”

Other research on high school cheating found in 2020 that 64% of 70,000 high school students across the country admitted to cheating on a test, and 58% admitted to plagiarism. Approximately 95% of high school students, meanwhile, said they “participated in some form of cheating, whether it was on a test, plagiarism or copying homework.”

And in one Pennsylvania high school, 90 of the 100 respondents to a 2018 school survey “admitted to cheating on some form of schoolwork at least once.”

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

Students can cheat for different reasons.

They might feel unprepared for an exam or paper, but they still want to get good grades and gain admission into a competitive college.

They might recognize that cheating is wrong, but they justify it by saying everyone else is doing the same thing, or that they have teachers who don’t do their jobs well. Other students might not fully understand what cheating means in different contexts or think that what they are doing counts as cheating.

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

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

Looking the Other Way

A 2020 study of 840 undergraduate college students found that 32% of them had cheated in some way on an exam.

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

The Wall Street Journal, for example, reported in 2025 that faculty across the country are giving up on writing assignments, which students can produce with AI, and returning to in-class tests and examinations.

Every college and university has rules against plagiarism and other forms of intellectual dishonesty.

To offer one example, Harvard’s policy says that “Cheating on exams or problem sets, plagiarizing or misrepresenting the ideas or language of someone else as one’s own, falsifying data, 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 affairs.”

Students who violate the cheating rules at Harvard and elsewhere might face consequences ranging from failing a class to being expelled. But many instructors don’t report incidents of cheating to administrators responsible for enforcing those rules and meting out punishments.

Few colleges have developed an intellectual integrity curriculum that treats cheating as a habit and works to counter it over the four years of a student’s college education.

I think that, like any bad habit, students can only be weaned from cheating slowly, with a support program and clear, severe consequences when they are caught.

Cheating in College

Getting a sense of the dimension of the cheating problem on college campuses is not hard.

In February 2026, for example, a Harvard undergraduate student named Matthew Tobin published an opinion piece in the Harvard Crimson entitled “Plagiarize or Perish.”

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

Tobin wrote that while some people say cheating is the result of “modern students’ scholastic disengagement or use of artificial intelligence,” other issues are at play. Plagiarism and academic misconduct “have been happening all too often at Harvard for far longer than the advent of these issues,” he wrote.

Reported academic misconduct cases increased at Ohio State University by 57% between 2014 and 2018. This is likely a low estimate, since most academic misconduct cases 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 its honor code charter to allow professors to proctor tests, meaning supervise students while they take the exam.

“Changing this policy is a clear sign that this school doesn’t trust us to learn to be adults with integrity,” McLaughlin wrote. “That’s sad. Maybe, it’s also reasonable. Maybe, we don’t deserve that trust. That’s even sadder.”

Princeton also recently abandoned its 133-year-old prohibition against proctoring exams “to address increasing concerns over academic integrity violations, including the proliferation of AI usage.”

A Teacher’s Dilemma

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

Unless colleges acknowledge these facts, I believe they have little chance to curb the pervasiveness of cheating.

Faculty can start by weaving discussions of intellectual integrity throughout their courses and enlisting students to think about who they want to be – and whether they want to live their lives cutting corners and gaming the system. Only then can colleges hope to build what Tobin calls “a commitment to academic integrity in (our) students.”