Opinion | The Only Way to Stop Students From Cheating

The day before a take-home exam in my undergraduate course at Wharton, a few students sent me frantic messages that some of their peers were planning to use artificial intelligence to cheat. Having spent the semester trying to bring out the best in each of them, I was dismayed to discover the worst in them. It felt like a betrayal.

When the 95 students logged in for the exam, however, they got a surprise. I’d ditched the multiple-choice and short-answer questions I usually include. Instead I asked the students to write an essay, using the principles of organizational psychology they’d been studying, on how to motivate students to stop cheating.

Their responses shocked me. Hardly any students saw cheating as a violation of integrity. A majority made excuses: We’re under a lot of stress. Everyone else is doing it. We have no choice. They sounded like major league baseball players in the steroid era. ChatGPT was their performance-enhancing drug.

As schools confront this problem, many teachers are switching to in-clblock essays and oral exams. Creating obstacles is never going to be enough. We need to get at the root of the problem by changing students’ underlying motivations.

Across a series of studies, in a wide range of contexts, psychologists have found that as the stakes of a competitive challenge go up, cheating does, too. Some people are largely immune to this effect. They don’t follow a logic of consequence by calculating whether the benefits of cheating would outweigh the costs. They ask themselves: What’s the right thing for someone like me to do in a situation like this? They have strong moral identities.

That’s the term psychologists use for caring deeply about being a person of honor and integrity. Extensive evidence shows that moral identity can help people resist the temptation to cheat, lie and steal.

When people have strong moral identities, they view unethical behavior as a violation — not just of the rules but also of their own values. They anticipate more guilt at the thought of wrongdoing and more pride at the prospect of doing the right thing. They believe their choices reflect their character. It’s powerful. And the best way to instill it is to get students to consistently think about the ethical consequences of their actions. The younger they start, the better.

Many schools try to activate moral identity by asking students to follow an honor code or take an honesty pledge. Integrity oaths are frequently ineffective — and sometimes they backfire. In one experiment, asking students to sign an honesty pledge before an exam doubled the rate of cheating. The mere existence of the pledge suggested to students that dishonest behavior was probably common, so they might as well cheat, too.

In the past, research showed that students who cheated felt guilty about it. It was a last resort stigmatized enough that many wouldn’t admit doing it. To estimate how common it was, researchers had to ask students about the rate of cheating in their clblock or run anonymous polls. Last year when I surveyed students at elite universities about their views of cheating, plenty of them admitted to doing it to get into college, and they signed the survey using their full names.

A.I. hasn’t just made cheating harder to catch. It’s made cheating so effortless, enticing and available that many students no longer believe it’s wrong. One Ivy League student in my survey wrote, “Cheating is a creative expression and a form of problem solving. If you can get around the restrictions put in place and not get caught, then good on you.” Really? How would you feel if you found out your surgeon cheated to get into medical school — or cheated in medical school?

Psychologists have found that many people judge their integrity using a system of credits and debits. After doing something virtuous, people often feel they’ve earned a license to indulge in a vice. “I’m a good person, so it’s OK to do a bad thing,” they rationalize, or, worse yet, “I’m a good person, so this isn’t a bad thing.” In my surveys, many students justified cheating by compartmentalizing it. Yes, they’d sometimes cheated, but they weren’t cheaters. They were just doing what was necessary to succeed.

That’s not true of people with strong moral identities. They feel a responsibility to do the right thing. That’s why some of my students reached out to warn me their clblockmates were planning to cheat, instead of just joining in. A way to help more students develop a moral compblock is to make ethics part of their curriculum.

The strongest evidence comes from financial advisers, who have to take a licensing exam to enter the field. In a landmark blockysis of over a million advisers, those who took the exam during years that it was weighted heavily toward questions about ethics — and who therefore had to study that topic a lot — went on to have 25 percent lower annual rates of misconduct. Even three years later, advisers who got more ethics education committed fewer violations than their colleagues who got less training.

It wasn’t just that they’d learned the rules. By spending more time with the material, by really working through it, they’d internalized a stronger sense of right and wrong in their profession. And if their employers underwent scandals, those advisers were more likely to leave, because they didn’t want to work for companies that violated their personal values.

Ethics education can make a difference, but we need to be thoughtful about how we deliver it. Integrity wasn’t instilled by hectoring or lecturing. It was up to the advisers to do more than memorize rules; they learned a whole moral code. As they grappled with what was ethical, they persuaded themselves it was important.

Timing matters, too. Studying ethics was especially influential for advisers who were inexperienced (and for those who didn’t already have a history of misconduct). If we want to instill strong moral identities in students, we should ideally start reaching them before they confront the temptation to cheat. Anonymous surveys estimate that by elementary school, about a third of students have already cheated, and the rates climb through middle and high school. And when they face temptations to cheat, it helps to reinforce moral identity.

In an experiment with over 20,000 people, the honesty pledges worked best when they helped participants recognize the moral implications of their actions. People were less likely to cheat after being reminded that honesty is an all-or-nothing concept and that doing the right thing fosters a culture of trust, social responsibility and integrity.

In every home and every school, we should be inviting kids to think about how cheating is unfair to their friends, how it undercuts efforts to build a just society and how it undermines the quest to become a person of principle.

The heart of integrity is recognizing that the ends don’t justify the means. What we achieve may define our success. How we achieve it determines our character.