For anyone scrolling quickly through their news feeds, it is easy to believe that all students are now using AI to cheat in school. Whether in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, the words “cheat” and “AI” seem to appear together with alarming frequency. The typical story is similar to a recent New York magazine feature in which a college student openly admits to using generative AI to “to cheat on nearly every assignment.”

With so many news headlines and anecdotes like these circulating, it feels like the rug is being pulled out from beneath the educational system. The exams, readings, and essays that were hallmarks of school now seem to be littered with AI cheating. In the most extreme cases, students use tools like ChatGPT to write and turn in full essays.

It can feel disheartening — but that common narrative is far from the full story.

Cheating is not a new phenomenon. I am an education researcher who studies AI cheating and our early evidence suggests that AI has changed the method but not necessarily the amount of cheating that was already happening.

This isn’t to say that cheating using AI is nothing to worry about or that it doesn’t pose new concerns. There are still important questions to figure out: Will cheating eventually increase in the future because of AI? Is all AI use for schoolwork cheating? How should parents and schools respond when we want to prepare our kids to succeed in a world that looks so different from what we experienced?

There are no easy answers yet, but to have a better understanding of our generational angst and growing worries, we need to unpack our understanding of cheating and how that affects what we know about how kids are using AI in school.

The ubiquity of cheating

Cheating has been around for a very long time — probably as long as schools have been around. In the 1990s and 2000s, Don McCabe, a business school professor at Rutgers University, documented very high levels of cheating in university students. One study from the ’90s, for example, broke down instances of cheating by major and found that up to 96 percent of students pursuing business majors reported engaging in “cheating behavior.”

How could McCabe get such surprising numbers? He used anonymous student surveys that asked students to report approximately how often they engaged in particular behaviors. These questions are worded carefully to withhold judgment or obvious negative associations. For example, a student would be asked how many times in the past year they had used an electronic device to find information during a test. Compared to other methods that asked students to state whether they had cheated, McCabe’s method resulted in far higher numbers of self-reported cheating behaviors.

Our early evidence suggests that AI has changed the method but not necessarily the amount of cheating that was already happening.

Those methods persist in much of the research today. Other, more recent studies from McCabe’s group showed that, up to 2020, more than 60 percent of students reported engaging in cheating behaviors.

College students cheat for a range of reasons. For instance, students who feel very anxious about math have incentive to cheat in a subject where they believe they cannot otherwise succeed. On the other hand, for assignments that seem like low priority, busy-work — such as excessively long problem sets — cheating feels like a time-saver. If students think that everyone else around them is cheating, they are prone to view certain behaviors as more acceptable. Similarly, students consider cheating more acceptable if they sense that a class (or teacher or school) just does not really care about what students are getting from the class.

For high schoolers, the cheating numbers have long been high as well. Multiple studies in the 2010s had the figure above 80 percent, drawing from samples across many high schools in many regions. Again, this was all before ChatGPT and its ilk had entered the scene. High schoolers have named similar........

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