A generation of cheaters

The end of academic honesty, sponsored by ChatGPT

A school in China had over 12,000 students conduct their exams outside in a playground, in part to prevent cheating. (Photo by Visual China Group via Getty Images)

Cheating isn't new. Every generation has found its tools: crib sheets, scribbled TI-84 programs, early-2000s essay mills, a friend who took the class last semester.

Of course, the extent to which students cheat depends in part on the available tools. In the 1940s, according to the Educational Testing Service’s Academic Cheating Fact Sheet, just 20% of college students reported cheating in high school. By the time the internet arrived, that number had climbed to over 70%.

Then, one researcher surveyed 70,000 high school students and found that 95% admitted to some form of academic dishonesty like plagiarism, cheating on a test, or copying someone else’s homework. And to many, cheating is not a big deal — just a “means to a profitable end.”

But it used to be that cheating required effort. You could cheat on the test with notes stuffed in your sleeve, but you still had to do something to get them, like shake down the local nerd or something. AI has removed all that friction.

The impulse to cheat hasn’t changed — students have always wanted easier paths. But now, for nearly every type of assignment, cheating is almost always easier.

In other words, the cheating cost curve has shifted to the point that the cost of cheating with AI is essentially zero. And when the cost of a behavior drops to zero, it stops being a deviation from the norm. It becomes the norm — and volume explodes.

We’ve seen this across digital economies like content (everyone has a Substack now!), trading (everyone bought some GameStop on Robinhood!) and attention (the infinite scroll, the autoplay videos, the endless notifications!). Scale changes the social meaning.

Cheating has historically been treated as a deviation from a norm. It was just kids trying to game a system that still, at baseline, mostly functioned. The implicit deal — that working hard, earning a college degree, and therefore getting a good job — was real enough that violating it felt like at least a little bit of a moral conundrum.

People usually cheated because they were lazy, scared of asking for help, or overwhelmed by the pressure to achieve. But as the social contract linking education to The Good Life^TM has broken down, it’s getting harder to claim that cheating is irrational. The friction of cheating used to keep things manageable, and the reward structure kept most people playing by the rules. Now, both of these are breaking down.

AI is generating a cohort of cheaters

Over half of American teenagers have used AI for schoolwork, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Almost 60% believe students at their school use chatbots to cheat at least somewhat often. One-third say it happens extremely or very often.