How ChatGPT and other AI tools enable systemic cheating in college, unravelling the entire academic project; one student says “the ceiling has been blown off”

ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project. — Chungin “Roy” Lee stepped onto Columbia University's campus …

New York Magazine 2025-05-07 James D. Walsh

Context & Ripple Effects

Educators flagged AI-enabled cheating as potentially undetectable soon after ChatGPT's release, while a later high-school survey found no rise in cheating—an early caution against treating anecdote as universal evidence. By 2024, however, professors were still confronting the difficulty of detecting AI-assisted work across assignments.

This account moves the concern from individual detection toward the credibility of academic assessment itself: if submitted work no longer reliably evidences a student's capability, grades and credentials become harder for institutions to defend.

First-order effects

Students can use ChatGPT and similar tools to produce or substantially alter coursework, weakening the connection between a submitted assignment and an individual student's learning.
Columbia and other colleges face immediate pressure to reassess assignments whose integrity depends primarily on take-home written output; instructors bear more of the verification burden.

Second-order effects

Detection tools and misconduct procedures become less decisive when AI assistance is difficult to distinguish from legitimate drafting support, extending a problem educators had identified as potentially undetectable AI-enabled cheating.
Programs may shift weight toward supervised, oral, iterative, or process-based assessment, changing course design and increasing the time required to evaluate students.

Third-order effects

If AI-assisted submission becomes normalized, academic credentials may increasingly need to demonstrate verified performance rather than simply completed written work.
The durable response is likely to be institutional AI-use governance—clear boundaries, assessment design, and enforcement—rather than a detection-only contest whose reliability remains contested.

The trend: Generative AI is forcing institutions to redesign trust-based evaluation systems around verifiable human performance and operational governance.

Discussion

@mugrimm Grimm on bluesky
AI is the final nail in the coffin of just turning college into a pay for accreditation system and nothing more. — nymag.com/intelligence... [image]
@mollytaft.com Molly Taft on bluesky
this is one of the more depressing things i have read this year thus far, which is really saying something given this year
@beebrookshire Bethany Brookshire on bluesky
This is just so incredibly sad to me. — It's not just that people think they are clever for hacking their way through school without work. — It's that they don't WANT to learn new things. They don't WANT to improve skills. They don't WANT EDUCATION. nymag.com/intelligence..…
@astrokatie.com Katie Mack on bluesky
Bleak. — nymag.com/intelligence... [image]
@1t2ls Elliot on bluesky
There was a Chronicle of Higher Ed essay that came out when I was in college about the widespread use of essay farms among graduate students (ironically, especially those getting education degrees). — This article is that, but 1000 times worse.
@anjulierao Anjulie Rao on bluesky
Many of my students come to writing having learned that all writing is to be read and evaluated by others. When we start writing for ourselves—a form of documentation, reflection, etc—the pressure to “achieve” may be replaced by desire to remember or discover. nymag.com/intellig…
@karenho Karen K. Ho on bluesky
This is among the most depressing things I have ever read, and makes me very nervous about the ability for any of these daily ChatGPT users to independently problem-solve or think creatively: nymag.com/intelligence...
@patrickhowelloneill.com Patrick Howell O'Neill on bluesky
As someone who just completed an online degree program last year, I think this is roughly correct. It was extremely easy to spot AI-generated work from students — the LLM stuff was everywhere. I don't know what I'd do as a teacher, tough to prove, but from a writer's standpoint…
@ibogost Ian Bogost on bluesky
I've said this before, but AI is really just an accidental zenith of a whole culture of knowledge we built based on min-maxing, an art young people have mastered in particular.
@chrislhayes Chris Hayes on bluesky
I really try to resist the pull of being a middle aged man just shaking his head at the world going to hell in a handbasket, but this makes it hard! — nymag.com/intelligence...
@jwherrman John Herrman on bluesky
this is about AI but it's really about hustle culture, which is american culture nymag.com/intelligence... [image]
@eric-reinhart.com Eric Reinhart on bluesky
The humanities-denigrating, STEM-affirming, and neoliberal-university-promoted idea that the reason to pursue education is to enhance one's career potential rather than to learn to think and create for oneself is a big part of why ChatGPT has such appeal. — nymag.com/intelligen…
@ptklein.com @ptklein.com on bluesky
There are lots of threads to pick up and work through here with regards to why so many students see AI tools as not cheating. Thirty years of dishonest startup culture in the mainstream, the valorization of a libertarian ethos that prizes individuals, the political ascendency of…
@ositanwanevu.com Osita Nwanevu on bluesky
Don't have anything new to say about AI here. One thing I will say is that higher ed has long been broken. If elites had spent more time thinking through the point of education and how well we really do it than stoking woke panic, maybe we wouldn't be staring at this abyss. nym…
@marcusluther Marcus Luther on bluesky
“You just don't really have to think that much.” — Welp. Woke up in a good mood, had some coffee, and now this will live in my head all day in the worst of ways. — (But yes we should all read this article today.) — nymag.com/intelligence... [image]
@nkalamb Nathan Kalman-Lamb on bluesky
the technodystopia is here — nymag.com/intelligence... [image]
@bgrueskin Bill Grueskin on bluesky
This is yet one more reason, as if we needed it, to ban electronic devices in classrooms — nymag.com/intelligence... [image]
@hypervisible @hypervisible on bluesky
“Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate...Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else'…
@hypervisible @hypervisible on bluesky
Oh yeah, but please tell me more about how this tech should infuse every aspect of education.
@pbump.com Philip Bump on bluesky
This article plants a clear flag marking our current path and is very much worth a read. But also this quote has had me cringing for 32 minutes. — nymag.com/intelligence... [image]
@jvagle.me Jeffrey Vagle on bluesky
The Silicon Valley Ideology seeps into every aspect of life that it can, and it's corroding our future. — nymag.com/intelligence... [image]
@fheimburger Franziska Heimburger on bluesky
This is a pretty depressing read if you teach anything with writing in it nymag.com/intelligence... It also makes me want to burn down all the evaluation formats which never really worked and start from a clean slate.
@veronica@mastodon.online Veronica Olsen on mastodon
What is even the point of education if you don't actually intend to learn anything? I always hated oral exams, but at this point they seem like a very good idea. — “A philosophy professor across the country at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock caught students in her Et…
@mattzeitlin Matthew Zeitlin on x
we are fast becoming an illiterate society but there will be some funny stuff along the way [image]
@jackcalifano Jack Califano on x
What's crazy is that in 5-10 years... enshitification is going to occur. These companies are gonna charge $20, $50, $100 a month to use these tools, and these kids will be literally incapable of saying no. It's going to be a huge transfer of wealth lol
@cszabla @cszabla on x
“I just insert 20% of my humanity” after AI - jesus
@resurrecti0ns @resurrecti0ns on x
so many people (not just students) have this idea that a university is somehow trying to exploit or trick or punish you when it assigns you work. they're trying to help you! they can't teach you anything if you refuse to do any work!
@_zeets Zito on x
The kids are cooked [image]
@pourfairelevide Jon Repetti on x
we are jumping off the cliff into mass illiteracy and nobody with any power at any major university or secondary school system is willing to do anything about it [image]
@bernstein Joe Bernstein on x
The thing that frightens me about this isn't that kids aren't learning to write, per se. It's that learning how to write also teaches you how to think, and the downstream problems presented by a population who can't think are actually scary. https://nymag.com/...
@old_ric @old_ric on x
very depressing [image]
@davidastinwalsh David Austin Walsh on x
I'm going full Luddite in my classes next year. Zero-tolerance policy for laptops, phones, etc. I don't want to have to do a blue book exam but that may end up being what happens.
@mhersonhorvath @mhersonhorvath on x
looking like a ‘lost generation’ situation [image]
@joshkraushaar Josh Kraushaar on x
“Professors and teaching assistants increasingly found themselves staring at essays filled with clunky, robotic phrasing that, though grammatically flawless, didn't sound quite like a college student — or even a human.” https://nymag.com/...
@ruairi_casey Ruairí Casey on x
“A philosophy professor across the country at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock caught students in her Ethics and Technology class using AI to respond to the prompt “Briefly introduce yourself and say what you're hoping to get out of this class.""
@jerusalemdemsas @jerusalemdemsas on x
This is another really good article on the problem of AI cheating in schools but... I'm still left with the question of why this isn't solved by switching back to blue book essays written in class.
@bridgetgillard Bridget Read on x
it's like americans pretended for half a century that capitalism incentivized social benefit and now it's just mask off get your bag https://nymag.com/...
@joshkraushaar Josh Kraushaar on x
“When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It's the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.” https://nymag.com/...
@gnrosenberg @gnrosenberg on x
I'll be on leave for the next year but I have great clarity about what my classroom will be like when I return: zero technology allowed in class, oral and blue book exams, and no out-of-class essay assignments (some in-class writing, however). https://nymag.com/...
@_eric_reinhart Eric Reinhart on x
The humanities-denigrating, STEM-affirming, and neoliberal-university-promoted idea that the reason to pursue education is to enhance one's career potential rather than to learn to think and create for oneself is a big part of why ChatGPT has such appeal. https://nymag.com/...
@bigmeaninternet Malcolm Harris on x
I do think the bright side here is that opposition to all of this could be the basis for a salutary and maybe politically important counter-culture https://nymag.com/...
@brandyljensen Brandy Jensen on x
just unrelentingly bleak https://nymag.com/...
@mattnoahsmith Matthew Noah Smith on x
In response to the linked article. 1: The rampant use of ChatGPT is due in part to a society-wide failure to value education for its own sake. By treating a pure means to an end - wealth - as a final end, we have ethically crippled a generation. https://nymag.com/...
@arod_twit @arod_twit on x
Yes yes, the human capacity to think critically is being kneecapped en masse, but it's kind of funny that male tech founder aspirants have adopted a ring by spring attitude about college
@mikeisaac Rat King on x
bleak https://nymag.com/... [image]
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