The Chronicle of Higher Education has a troubling, if not unexpected report, “Cheating Has Become Normal: Faculty members are overwhelmed, and the solutions aren’t clear.” It begins with an anecdote that would be funny if it weren’t so apocalyptic. A professor caught a student cheating, and warned him that the next time this happened, he would be failed in the course. The student wrote an abject apology, full of contrition and assurances. Then his next assignment was found to be composed by an AI bot. Then, just for giggles, the prof asked the same bot to compose a letter of apology for a student who had been caught cheating. The bot produced exactly the apology the student had submitted, word for word.
From the article:
- “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.”
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“In an online course, [a professor]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? …”
- “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.”
If our supposed “best and brightest” (see this post from yesterday) are all cheating, that’s another good reason not to trust their political views, their values, or them in general. Widespread cheating is a sure sign of culture rot, and to coin a phrase coined by somebody else, the fish rots from the head down.
The party that most of our college students are being indoctrinated to support keeps putting out inflated monthly job numbers, boasts about them, then quietly announces the real lesser numbers a month or more later. Cheating.
The President was caught plagiarizing a speech when he was a Senator. The Democratic candidate put her name on a book plagiarizing other authors. The President of Harvard was caught in egregious plagiarism, but kept her seven figure teaching job. Cheating.
Clinton and Trump admitted cheating on their wives (never mind Johnson, Kennedy, FDR…). Illegal immigrants who cheat to get across our border are saluted as heroes for “just trying to get a better life for their children.” Journalists cheat all the time: “Sixty Minutes” substituted in a (somewhat) clear Harris answer for a more typical incoherent one—and denied that they had done it despite indisputable evidence. Cheating.
Today we are seeing an emerging scandal involving the Harris campaign paying for what were represented to the public as sincere and voluntary celebrity endorsements. Activists use fake or misleading statistics. “Peer reviewed” scientific papers use falsified data. Our younger baseball writers see no reason not to honor steroid cheats like Barry Bonds in the Hall of Fame. Biological men and boys are competing in women’s and girl’s sports because they can excel that way. Cheating.
School administrators can’t do anything about the nature of that metaphorical water their young fish breathe and swim in. By the time a student get into college, it’s too late to teach him or her ethical habits. Public education needs to teach ethics (though few teachers are qualified to teach it). The punishment for cheating need to be harsh, and included shaming. Current events that involve cheating need to be discussed and dissected in classrooms beginning in the early grades.
Whatever the answer is, we better find it fast. Accepted cheating is the beginning, the canary in the mine. The end is a society where nobody can be trusted, everything is for sale, and corruption is the norm. Africa. Russia. China. Mexico.
We need to be better.
Ethics Alarms 
Homeschool your kids! Where do they learn this? They learn it from 13+ years of public education. Most schools encourage cheating. It keeps standardized test scores up. By the time they get to college, they have been cheating for a decade or so with the encouragement of the teachers and administrators.
Now in college, the administrators are focused on keeping the students. The population implosion is wreaking havoc on the colleges and there aren’t enough students to go around. Students want degrees, but they don’t want to work at it. They will manipulate the professors and the administrators to make sure there are not stiff punishments for cheating.
The accreditation agencies should never have allowed this many colleges. However, they are not capable of shutting the worst ones down, since their accreditation policies were written by education majors and emphasize grades and arbitrary assessment data, not learning. We now have to have extensive assessment for student clubs. You can’t have a club where students can just hang out and socialize. They have to go to a ‘leadership event’, they have to do community service, they have to get the whole university involved and then you have to write it all up in an assessment document. I think the group I belong to is just going to disband because it isn’t worth it anymore.
https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-ken-paxton-announces-indictments-against-participants-pay-pass-scheme-fraudulently-0
The teachers routinely cheat.
Mr. Marshall,
Excellent article on Cheating! Thank you. Hal Morlan
Thanks, Hal. Wish you would drop by more often!
Cheating.
Like the pharmaceutical industry.
Like inflationary fiscal policies.
Like every freaking war we have been involved in since the revolution.
Like what elite athletes are not doping in some way.
Like every single lie that is pumped in front of our faces every day on the internet
It’s just the “death of truth” at scale.
With no sense or reference for absolute truth, people are smart enough to understand that truth is then defined by the winner and they play all the games accordingly. Rhetorically, what has not been cheating?
Another symptom of a low-trust society.
https://realclearwire.com/articles/2024/11/12/waste_of_the_day_million-dollar_cheating_ring_at_houston_schools_1071539.html
”Five people, including three Houston school employees, were indicted in October for allegedly running a million-dollar cheating ring that allowed over 200 educators to falsify their teaching certifications.”
If we want to fix the culture of cheating, we might want to start by firing all the teachers. Seems the rot is pretty entrenched in the educational establishment.
Have to say, the author of the article is also cheating.
‘Then, just for giggles, the prof asked the same bot to compose a letter of apology for a student who had been caught cheating. The bot produced exactly the apology the student had submitted, word for word.’
Generative AI never produces the same output twice, even when you ask it exactly the same question.
1. How do YOU know? “Never”? That’s impossible for you to say.
2. Who’s “the author of the article”? Did you check the link? My article related correctly what was written in the Chronicle of Higher Education. That article came to me through Paul Caron, law professor, who quoted the article exactly on his blog, Tax Prof Blog. All three articles relayed what the professor interviewed for the original piece said in substance. The exact quote: “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.”
So who are you accusing of cheating? Me? Prof.Caron? Beth McMurtrie, the writer of the COHE piece? You quoted ME.
If you wrote the “gotcha!” comment without actually reading the linked article, and the evidence strongly suggests that.then the one who cheated was you. You rushed to get in your shot without doing the necessary work.
Not cool, and I don’t appreciate it.
I’ve been thinking about this, and would like to make two, somewhat tangential, points.
First, that there is effectively no such thing as a society where everything (including justice) is for sale, as sale implies a consensual exchange of value for honest value, a criterion which cheaters do not honor. What we have in its stead is a society where everything is stolen.
Second, I feel sorry for young people who will go through life having never experienced having an authentic written voice of their own, except perhaps for texting shorthand, the written equivalent of grunts and gestures. I suppose such people have always existed, but before they probably did not imagine themselves to be literate, let alone well-educated.