by Joe Miller
During my time teaching at West Point, one of my colleagues at West Point quipped that higher education is the one place where Americans are systematically determined not to get their money’s worth.
By the early aughts, there were plenty of websites that listed the easiest courses and the most generous graders at a given university. Students regularly asked things like “is this going to be on the test?” in the hope that they could ignore classroom discussions. Most missed the maximum number of classes allowable without failing.
Perhaps most insidiously, students cheated.
In philosophy classes – where grades were based on essays rather than exams – cheating usually took the form of plagiarism.
One semester when I was a teaching assistant at the University of Virginia, my colleagues and I uncovered nine copies of the same essay. One student had written the paper and given it to eight friends. More often, though, we found essays from paper mills – websites filled with papers on any topic, available for download for a few dollars each.
My absolute favorite plagiarism case came during my time as an assistant professor at UNC–Pembroke. A student assigned to write a paper on Rene Descartes’ Second Meditation handed in a five-page essay that was word-for-word Descartes’ Third Meditation.
You almost have to admire the chutzpa of a student who convinces himself that a college professor won’t notice when a 21st century freshman starts writing like a 17th century French philosopher.
I’m pretty sure that I taught during the golden age of catching cheaters.
Before the web, a determined cheater would have to go to the library, pull a book from the shelves and copy a passage. You’d get caught only if the professor had read – and remembered – the book you happened to pull.
Plagiarizing from the web requires little effort from the students. But it’s just as easy for professors to catch. Nine times out of ten, the plagiarized material came from the first link that popped up when googling the essay prompt. It’s a pretty ironclad law of the universe that students who are too lazy to complete assignments are also too lazy to cheat effectively.
Let me tell you, though – I am really glad not to be teaching now. Thanks to ChatGPT, cheating has never been easier to do or harder to detect.
A New York Magazine article from May 2025 sports the provocative headline: “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College.”
That’s not much of an overstatement. The magazine reports that a survey taken just two months after ChatGPT had launched found that 90% of students admitted using it to complete homework assignments.
Less than three years since its launch, ChatGPT already shows cyclical monthly user numbers. Use declines in June, when students begin summer vacation, and picks back up in September, when most students return.
Students are using ChatGPT (and, to a lesser degree, various other generative AI programs) to take notes, write papers, prepare study guides and complete problem sets in math, science and engineering courses.
Amusingly, New York Magazine reports that students used AI to cheat in a course titled “Ethics and Artificial Intelligence.”
Joe Miller
joe.miller@fountaindigitalconsulting.com
