Rethinking Cheating and AI: A Reflection on Academic Integrity (Part 2)

In my earlier post, I explored a common question educators raise about Generative AI:
“How can I know if students really know the material—or if AI did the work for them?”

It’s a valid concern. But rather than blaming AI, I believe we must refocus the conversation on something more foundational: our learning intentions, our instructional design, and how we teach students about academic integrity.

Rethinking Academic Integrity in the Classroom
As educators, we’re tasked with ensuring that students demonstrate mastery of key skills and concepts—often represented by a passing grade or course credit. But what does that credit truly represent? What does it mean for a student to earn it?

When doing initial training on Gen AI with educators, I often get questions about cheating and AI.  When these questions occur, I invite them to reflect on these questions:

• How much time do you spend discussing academic integrity with your students?
• How do you define it in your classroom—and why does it matter?
• How do you support students in revisiting and applying academic integrity throughout your course?

Many educators admit they mention cheating briefly on day one—then shift into the curriculum. But if we truly value academic integrity, we must teach it with the same intentionality we give to any other core concept. We must move beyond a list of “don’ts” and help students understand why integrity matters and how to practice it.

AI Didn’t Invent Cheating—It’s Just a New Tool

Cheating is not a byproduct of AI. Students have cheated long before calculators, computers, or ChatGPT existed. Cheating is a choice, a decision to misrepresent one’s knowledge using unauthorized resources. 

Recent research from Stanford University (Victor R. Lee and Denise Pope) shows that the rate of cheating among college students has not increased with the release of ChatGPT. In fact, it may have decreased slightly. This finding challenges a common assumption and reminds us that tools don’t cause cheating; instructional context and student understanding do.

Start with the Learning Intention

Tony Frontier, in his book AI With Intention, writes:

• “If we value academic integrity, students will need to be taught the skills and strategies required to demonstrate academic integrity.” (p. 37)

This resonates deeply. If we want students to act with integrity, we must intentionally design opportunities for them to do so. And that starts with clearly defined learning intentions.

When educators express concerns about AI-related cheating, I often ask:

• “What is the specific learning intention with the assignment in question?”

Many struggle to answer—not due to negligence, but because the assignment was inherited, rushed, or designed more for engagement than alignment. I've been there myself—creating fun activities that didn’t actually help students meet learning goals.

Designing for Alignment, Not Avoidance

A wise leader once said something I’ve never forgotten:
“If you’re giving them work they can Google, is it really helping them learn?”
Rather than redesigning assignments to prevent cheating, we should create experiences where the only way to succeed is by building the knowledge and skills we’re aiming to develop. If learning intentions are clear and the tasks are thoughtfully aligned, it becomes much harder, and perhaps, less tempting for students to cheat.

When I taught Design Thinking for a year, our team carefully defined learning intentions aligned to both content standards and key skills: critical thinking, collaboration, communication, creativity, and student agency. This process took a lot of time at first, but it allowed us to design activities and scaffolds that genuinely supported student growth while making academic integrity part of the learning journey.

Academic Integrity in Practice: A Chemistry Lab Example

In my college chemistry lab course, I begin each semester by explaining my role -
I am responsible for determining whether students have gained the knowledge and skills needed to earn credit in chemistry.

That means I must see their thinking, not ChatGPT’s, not a friend’s, not a Google result. We discuss how their submitted work and their performance in the lab should reflect their individual progress toward our learning goals.

And I don’t just say it once. I revisit this expectation throughout the course.  Last semester, students needed to analyze the variability in their experimental results. This required calculating standard deviation. But the learning intention wasn’t about hand-calculating formulas—it was about understanding what standard deviation reveals about the consistency of their data.

So I made a decision.  Rather than spend 15–20 minutes on manual calculations, we used GenAI to compute the values, then focused our mental energy on interpreting the results. I explained why this approach supported our learning intention and reminded students that tools are appropriate when they support learning, not when they bypass it.

It felt like a real-world lesson in academic integrity, one that connected ethics to purpose, not just a statement included in my course syllabus.

The Path Forward: Academic Integrity & Teaching with Intention

If we want students to act with academic integrity, we must:

• Define it clearly in our classrooms.
  
• Embed it consistently in our instruction.
  
• Design learning experiences where integrity is both necessary and valued.
  
  

Our goal is to recenter our practice on learning, helping students understand why they’re learning what they’re learning, and how to do so with honesty, curiosity, and pride.

Questions to Guide Educators in Academic Integrity:

• Do my students understand why integrity matters in this course?
  
• Are my learning intentions clear and well-aligned with the tasks I assign?
  
• Am I modeling the thoughtful use of tools in support of learning—not in place of it?
  
  

Academic integrity isn’t an obstacle—it’s a learning opportunity. And in the age of AI, it’s one we can’t afford to ignore.


Note:  If you're looking for a thoughtful read on this topic, I highly recommend Tony Frontier's AI With Intention: Principles and Action Steps for Teachers and School Leaders.

Disclaimer:  The original post was written by Brian Whitson and edited using Chat GPT.  The original blog was edited by Chat GPT to make it more concise for readers.  Changes incorporated reflect subtitles as well a stronger parallel between verb tenses and changes in certain words.  All changes were reviewed and either accepted or edited to reflect the author's true voice.  The image above was also created by Chat GPT based on the blog post.