Why Are Students Using AI To Cheat? Maybe Because They Shouldn't Be In College At All
AI cheating is often a crutch for students ill-equipped to attend a four-year university.
AI cheating is endemic in high schools and colleges. Stories proliferate showing just how many students unashamedly use AI programs like ChatGPT and Gemini to do their academic work for them, whether that's completing math homework or writing entire essays. But why is this happening? Here's one underrated factor: many students may be turning to AI because they can't handle the academic rigors of college, and are turning to large language models like ChatGPT to hide their deficiencies. That, mixed with old-fashioned laziness, could be driving the proliferation of AI cheating. For both situations, the solution may be less college education, not more.
What does laziness mean? Well, plenty of students who are clearly capable of handling college-level work still use ChatGPT and other AI models to do their school work. In one recent article, Hua Hsu, a staff writer for The New Yorker, interviewed several NYU students who openly admitted they use AI to cheat on assignments.
"We had to read Robert Wedderburn for a class," one student told Hsu, (Wedderburn was a 19th-century Jamaican abolitionist). "But, obviously, I wasn't tryin' to read that." Instead, the student told Claude, a large language model developed by Anthropic, to turn the reading into "concise bullet points."
Another student told Hsu about an art history class, saying, "I'm trying to do the least work possible, because this is a class I'm not hella fucking with."
Like many young people, these students aren't so much interested in obtaining a college education as a college degree. They don't believe higher education has much to offer them, and are cynical credentialists, jumping through the necessary hoops in order to get a diploma that will open doors to the work they actually want to be doing.
For the lazy credentialists, they may actually be right that college has little to offer them. There are plenty of fields for which college is a pointless credentialing exercise. If someone has the coding chops to start a job in tech or finance at 18—or the writing skills and curiosity to become a journalist—forcing them to suffer through four years of additional, costly education only wastes time and money.
On the other hand, there are the students who don't have the academic skills to succeed in a four-year university without serious help. These students are likely a significant portion of the young people enrolled in college, and many of them will ultimately drop out, considering one in three college students fail to graduate after six years. In 2022, for example, just 22 percent of students who took the ACT college entrance exam scored high enough to be deemed college-ready, yet 45 percent of graduating high school seniors immediately enrolled in a four-year college.
How serious is the situation? A 2024 study found that 58 percent of English majors at two Midwestern universities could not understand the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens' Bleak House well enough to read the book on their own. And again, these were students who specifically chose to major in English. According to the study, incoming students at both schools had an average ACT reading score of 22.4 out of 36 points, which is actually above the college readiness benchmark of 18.
In the study, participants frequently indicated that they could not read complex texts without outside help, such as SparkNotes, which goes to show that AI is only the latest and most effective crutch for struggling students.
"If I was to read this [Bleak House] by itself and didn't use anything like that [SparkNotes], I don't think I would actually understand what's going on 100% of the time," one student told researchers. Another said that she would read Bleak House by "skim[ming] through most of the novel and read[ing] only certain passages in detail."
These students are harmed by colleges—especially dying liberal arts colleges and second-tier public universities—desperate to fill seats in order to stay open. These schools happily take students' tuition dollars (often in the form of loans), despite ample evidence that they need serious academic remediation. Some of these students would surely have been academically prepared to attend college had they received a better high school education, but at any rate, remediation ought to be done in low-cost community colleges, not four-year universities.
For these students, it's hard to imagine that they could successfully complete their degrees without help from a tool that can summarize and simplify texts for them. But while sites like SparkNotes have existed for years, AI is able to actually write essays for these students as well as explain texts.
The students who won't use ChatGPT, though, are the ones who believe they actually need to be educated and who are drawn to genuine intellectual inquiry. These students get something out of a college degree, both because it confers skills they did not already have and because they have the academic aptitude and interest to seriously grapple with complex text or high-level math. For these students, writing the essay or working on the practice problems is the point—not a useless hurdle to what they really want to be doing.
Fundamentally, though, just about anyone can be tempted by laziness. Instituting serious punishments for cheating would also go a long way to deterring AI cheating. Even so, the dominance of ChatGPT in college life is no more inevitable than college student mediocrity is inevitable. AI cheating is just another symptom of declining educational rigor—coupled with grade inflation and test-optional admissions.
In order to get rid of AI cheating in college, universities would need to shift from credentialing machines to places of genuine inquiry. To do that, capable young people need access to good-paying jobs without a college degree. And for those who stay, college needs to get a lot more difficult.
