To Stop Cheating in School, Address the Root Cause (Adam Grant)

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. This article appeared in The New York Times, August 30, 2026. The day before a take-home exam in my undergraduate course at Wharton, a few students sent me frantic messages that some of their peers were planning to use artificial intelligence to cheat. Having spent the semester trying to bring out the best in each of them, I was dismayed to discover the worst in them. It felt like a betrayal. When the 95 students logged in for the exam, however, they got a surprise. I’d ditched the multiple-choice and short-answer questions I usually include. Instead I asked the students to write an essay, using the principles of organizational psychology they’d been studying, on how to motivate students to stop cheating. Their responses shocked me. 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…