Every student is cheating with AI

Last month, a Brown professor wrote about discovering that a majority of his students had used AI to cheat on his take-home exam. He was irate about this “scandal,” despite the university seemingly doing little to respond. I attended a well-ranked university until last year. The truth is: essentially every student is cheating with AI. Every single one. Nobody doesn't cheat. It comes in the form of coding assignments fully produced by ChatGPT, running problem sets through Claude, and writing foreign-language essays with the help of Gemini. Take-home exams are entirely free rein. Basically every student cheats in some form on take-home exams. The Brown professor's article doesn't describe any kind of isolated behavior. Every student at a university today knows that this is the truth. So why is cheating with AI so common? Other forms of cheating — say, plagiarism or paying someone to write your essay — were quite uncommon. I think it comes down to a few things: Cheating with AI feels…