Last week I wrote about what AI had done to the 130-year-old honor code at Princeton. That code, which was instituted in the 1890s, required professors to step outside of classrooms during exams as a sign of how much they trusted the honestly of their undergrads. Last week, Princeton reversed course. Professors will now remain in classrooms and take notes on anyone who seems to be cheating using AI.
Yesterday a senior at Stanford told nearly the same story about his school. Stanford also has a 100-year-old honor code and, according to Theo Baker, that code is now being routinely violated by students taking advantage of ChatGPT to complete assignments.
Cheating has become omnipresent. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t used A.I. to get through some assignment in college, yet the school was at first slow to realize how widespread this would become. As freshman year went on, some professors suggested that the “nuclear option” might be called for: allowing faculty to proctor in-person exams, a practice banned at the university for over a century to demonstrate “confidence in the honor” of students…
About halfway through freshman year, some coding classes started requiring students to sign a declaration — “I did not utilize ChatGPT” — to submit each assignment. During the first term these attestations began to appear, I watched a freshman I knew sign the declaration that he’d done his homework without A.I. as ChatGPT was still open in the next window — while on the deck of a yacht party financed by venture capitalists. The incentive structures were not aligned toward honesty. One could get ahead, quickly, by cutting corners, by focusing on self-presentation…
Half of the laptops in any lecture seem to be open to ChatGPT or Claude. In the beginning, experimenting with models was a pastime for the nerds; showing off the early access you got to the next frontier large language model was a status symbol, and people would come pleading for your authorization keys to try it out for themselves. In just a few short years, however, A.I. has become a fact of life. “It’s all we talk about,” my ancient Greek art history professor remarked recently.
In April 2026, the proctored exam policy finally went into place. Because of A.I., most of us now take our tests by writing in blue books, like students a century ago, scribbling out answers by hand under keen observation. Meanwhile, we wonder constantly what will happen next.
The surveys that find around 30% of students admit to cheating with ChatGPT are vastly underestimating the reality. As this opinion piece indicates, nearly everyone at top schools is cheating some of the time and some of them are probably cheating all of the time.
What’s most frustrating about this is that it probably won’t matter. The students who get degrees from Princeton and Stanford will still have their choice of elite jobs while the honest students at a state school won’t be given the same choices.
And it’s already happening in high schools as well. Students applying to colleges all have to vow not to use ChatGPT on their application essays, but how many of them have used it to get an A in a class that is supporting their high GPA and class ranking? Based on what I’ve heard from my son who is currently a high school senior, the use of these tools is widespread.
What’s interesting is that the same students who are using these tools to get ahead are also angry that these tools might replace them entirely in a matter of years. When the former head of Google gave a graduation speech this past weekend, he was booed every time he mentioned AI.
The kids are alright!!
Former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt gets booed every time he mentions artificial intelligence during his commencement speech at the University of Arizona.
This generation just may save humanity after all. pic.twitter.com/L8wbujGnk8
— Power to the People ☭🕊 (@ProudSocialist) May 16, 2026
AI is going to be a blessing and a curse. But right now we need to prevent it from being a curse to our public schools and universities. People who cheat don’t actually learn anything. If you do that year after year you graduate knowing very little. That’s not a good foundation for the future of our country.
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