Why universities embrace cheats
Imagine you discover a magical ring that bestows invisibility on its wearer. What do you do next? Many an introductory ethics course has started with the Ring of Gyges from Plato’s Republic: the tale of a shepherd who found such a ring, then “seduced the king’s wife, and … set upon the king, and slew him and possessed his kingdom”. As freshmen discuss the old thought experiment this month, some will harbor smaller, more doable ambitions: to fake their first essay convincingly, and perhaps every piece of work thereafter.
To obtain the prize that helped him lose his scruples, Plato’s shepherd had to descend into a chasm, enter a hollow bronze horse through a small door, then remove the ring from the finger of a corpse. Students today just have to ask Claude. AI agents can create a literature review from scratch; fabricate data sets; write computer code or solve equations. They can even check exam answers in real time. Lecturers are apparently powerless to detect the malfeasance. Those students who find the inner strength to avoid such shortcuts are watching peers sail ahead of them in the rankings, effort-free.
This makes cheating a particular problem in aggressively competitive elite universities. Writing in The Atlantic, behavioral scientist John Paul Rollert reports that a third of Harvard students now admit to using AI illicitly. But it is also a growing problem in the academy as a whole. An estimated 22% of UK-based students used it to cheat in 2023/24, and the numbers have surely increased since then. Rollert worries that we are creating a generation with “a knack for cutting corners, a disdain for community rules, and an assumption that a spirit of integrity… is the reserve of suckers and wimps”. Though there is some truth in this, it all sounds a bit too Patrick Bateman for the average situation. Most young cheats are just following the crowd, and aren’t gaining a knack for anything at all.
The classic trickster archetype has always been glamorously countercultural. Plato’s shepherd seems ingenious and daring, despite his murderous desires. But AI doesn’t even give us that small consolation. It spawns impressive-looking symbols and sentences at the click of a mouse, and the user can’t take any credit. He doesn’t even need to understand what he is passing off as his own.
