Many college students already have well-formed cheating habits – that, not AI, is the real problem
Many college students already have well-formed cheating habits – that, not AI, is the real problem
Publish Date: 2026-06-17 08:15:00
Source Domain: theconversation.com
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…
