by Dan Burns

Jul 16, 2026, 7:00 AM

Certainly AI helps kids cheat in school

It’s not that lots of cheating hasn’t always happened at all school levels. I was known to curry favor by letting kids copy off of me. It’s that AI can be the ultimate crutch.

My study, conducted from spring 2025 to spring 2026, included 303 educators and other school professionals in Wisconsin – teachers, administrators, IT staff and technology directors, as well as school psychologists and counselors. I also surveyed another 132 professionals at schools across the country.

The results are not nationally representative, but they offer a snapshot of how some K–12 professionals are thinking about AI and student learning.

While a large number of respondents were concerned about AI bias, misinformation and data privacy, the most common worries were about academic dishonesty and plagiarism.

In Wisconsin, approximately 65% of respondents identified these issues as a concern, compared with 74% who did so on a broader, national level…

Teachers have long known that a student’s finished assignment is not perfect evidence of learning. A parent might help too much. A student might copy from a friend. A student might complete the work but not understand it well enough to explain it later.

Generative AI makes that problem more visible and more complicated…

The goal is not to catch every possible misuse of AI. That is likely impossible. The goal is to design learning tasks where teachers can still answer the question that matters most: What does this student actually understand?
(The Conversation)

A professor at Brown decided to give a take-home exam to undergrads in a challenging econ course. He had planned on doing the same with the final, in the wake of a shooting at that campus.

A suspicious Serrano decided that he would make the final exam in-person; he would see if students did similarly well on it. He emailed his class, telling them, “I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong. That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.”

Eighteen students suddenly dropped the course, while nine others didn’t even attend the final exam. Of those 27 students, El País noted, “22 had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam.”

Among those who took the test, the average score plunged—from 96 all the way down to 48.
(Ars Technica)

Perhaps it’s easy to be somewhat too doom-and-gloom about this. Plenty of students have the integrity to write their own papers, and if they use AI it’s in the same way that they would have consulted books in the library, pre-AI. You still can’t use AI to cheat on in-person exams. And in small classes the teachers generally get a good feel for which students are serious.

But as both articles I’ve quoted note at some point, in so many words, the real, fundamental issue is with people deciding that real learning isn’t worth the effort, because AI will always be there. With a lot of people their nature plus nurture has seen to it that really learning to think rationally, knowledgeably, and independently is going to be a tough sell in any case, because it’s never been what you’d call strongly emphasized in their homes and communities. Authoritarianism is a key factor in that. AI is making that sell that much tougher.