Inside Higher Ed
Writing at The New York Times, organizational psychologist, popular author and professor at the Wharton School Adam Grant informs the audience that “there’s really only one way to stop students from cheating.”
The way? Direct and concerted efforts to inculcate moral instruction that imbues young people with a strong sense that cheating is wrong: “In every home and every school, we should be inviting kids to think about how cheating is unfair to their friends, how it undercuts efforts to build a just society and how it undermines the quest to become a person of principle.”
As it happens, I am a strong believer in incorporating instruction on ethics into every subject and course. All my writing courses had both general and applied experiences on the ethics that attach to writing and communication. For example, I would discuss source citation not just as something to avoid a grade penalty from an instructor, but as an ethical responsibility both to the authors whose work we’re using and to the audience who is trusting us to be as accurate and transparent as possible.
Unfortunately, while you will get no objection from me when it comes to emphasizing ethical/moral practices in academic contexts, I am skeptical that this would be an inoculation against the kind of “cheating” Grant is primarily addressing—that is, outsourcing schoolwork to AI.
Grant says he was “shocked” by student responses in an exam exploring how the principles of organizational psychology could be applied to the problem of students cheating. “Hardly any students saw cheating as a violation of integrity. A majority made excuses: We’re under a lot of stress. Everyone else is doing it. We have no choice. They sounded like major league baseball players in the steroid era. ChatGPT was their performance-enhancing drug.”
I was not surprised by these findings, because they are consistent with what I learned from James Lang’s Cheating Lessons: Learning From Academic Dishonesty over a decade ago. Lang shows that academic dishonesty is largely situational and structural, rather than being a moral failing. It jibes with what I hear from students as I make my visits to various institutions to do talks and workshops on this subject. The notion that it might be “cheating” to use AI has little salience, given that what might be “cheating” in one course is required in another.
Grant is on target in identifying the root of the problem—“students’ underlying motivations”—and acknowledges a long-standing finding in his field that “as the stakes of a competitive challenge go up, cheating does, too” and then suggests that to counter this we must instill a “strong moral identity” in students where they ask, “What’s the right thing for someone like me to do in a situation like this?”
A strong moral identity is a protection against engaging in unethical behavior, but the shortcoming of this application to students in school is that what Grant labels “cheating” is not viewed through an ethical lens. Students can (and do) see cheating as wrong and still do use AI to do their homework. Moral identity isn’t worth much when the game you’re engaged in punishes moral behavior.
A reader comment on Grant’s piece from “Anonymous Student” makes things plain: “When you’re going into the workforce or even when you’re applying to college, it’s not enough to just be ‘good’—you have to beat everyone else. You have to be the best candidate. Good grades aren’t enough anymore—every college wants extracurricular activities. Every career or grad school wants internships or leadership experience, and those take time that could be used for studying—if you feed your work to an AI to do it literally gives you more hours in the day.”
The structures and incentives around academic dishonesty have only gotten worse since Lang published Cheating Lessons. The competition Anonymous Student describes is only more intense. Additionally, we have instant access to a homework machine that is also being sold as the future of well … everything … and so it gets used.
Anonymous Student sums it up: “Integrity is great, but you can’t eat good morals.”
While I think that Grant is off base in this approach to reducing student cheating, I don’t believe we are powerless against this serious challenge. Interestingly, I know this from some earlier work by Adam Grant.
Before we get to that, one truth we have to acknowledge is that there is no way to stop students from cheating in the sense Grant is talking about. Lang cites research finding that three-quarters of students acknowledge engaging in some form of academic dishonesty at some point in their lives. Reducing incidents of cheating to zero is simply not possible.
We can’t stop students from cheating where there are incentives to do so, but we can do much to change students’ underlying motivations. Rather than putting all our efforts into preventing cheating, we should be working on the problem of stoking student interest in meaningful intellectual development achieved through rigorous application of effort rooted in intrinsic motivation while engaging in experiences that are viewed as “purposeful, varied and fun.”
"Purposeful, varied and fun” are Grant’s words for the keys to practicing our way to success, as explored in his 2023 book, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things. In the book Grant looks at various successful individuals as case studies and how they intersect with the science of motivation and finds that these are the keys. “Cheating” is not a consideration because the experience of learning the skill—even though this learning may be frustrating and littered with failures—is engaging in and of itself.
These are the structural conditions that make cheating irrelevant.
We have to redesign the student experience to undermine the transactional system of schooling and instead focus on learning and development as the goal.
Grant surveyed students at elite colleges and reports many of them admitted to cheating, with one arguing, “Cheating is a creative expression and a form of problem-solving. If you can get around the restrictions put in place and not get caught, then good on you.” Grant points out that we would be appalled if our surgeon “cheated to get into medical school—or cheated in medical school,” and I suppose we would be, but this was also happening before ChatGPT. One hopes that the backstops around licensing certification will keep this from happening, but who knows?
No amount of moral instruction is going to change the mind of that student regarding whether or not cheating is the right thing to do. The only way to get students to stop cheating is to move away from worrying about cheating and instead focus on what it looks like when students are learning.
There is some breaking news on this front that I’m finding encouraging, and that will require a column (or three) of its own for me to process and reflect on, but for now, let me suggest this MIT report on AI in “teaching, learning, and research training” that looks like it’s raising all of the right questions around what we do and how we do it.
Consider that some homework, and failing to read it would only be cheating yourself.
