The Truth About Using AI to Cheat: What Students Really Think

We take a deep dive into how young people are using AI when it comes to their assignments.

There’s no denying the rise of artificial intelligence has opened up a lot of new opportunities, but it’s also been accused of creating a tonne of new ways for students to cheat.

 We wrote about how AI might force Aussie unis to go back to pen and paper here and about how Turnitin can now detect AI writing here.

But what happens when students decide to use a tool like ChatGPT to write their assignments? Is it really cheating?

We asked 576 young people about AI for our survey, “Young People’s Perception and Use of Generative AI” and got them to dish the dirt on cheating specifically.

Straight up–are students using AI to plagiarise? That’s an overwhelming no.

Seventy-one per cent of students who said they’d used Generative AI in any capacity said they had not, and would not in the future, use it to plagiarise.

But there was around 9 per cent that said they had, and would do so again.

This aligns with previous Australian research, which found that between 8 and 11 per cent of university students have submitted assignments written by someone else*.

Plenty of students are also using AI to help with their work. Our study found that 31 per cent of university students and 42 per cent of high school students are using AI to assist with their assignments.

TAKE OUR POLL     ❯

Are they telling their teachers about this though? Mmm, mostly no. In fact, of the students that have used AI for their assignments, three in five said they didn’t tell their lecturer or teacher about it.

So is using AI to help with assignments cheating? Turns out Gen Z is still making up their mind about this. 35 per cent of uni students said it is, 36 per cent said it’s not, and 29 per cent were unsure. A pretty even split, hey?

High school students were only a little more confident that it isn’t cheating with 39 per cent saying no, 27 per cent saying it is, and 33 per cent sitting on the fence.

Numbers schmumbers though, am I right? What do young people actually think about the use of AI to cheat and plagiarise? We asked, and you told us.

Do you consider using Generative AI tools for assignments cheating?

“It’s not your own work, it’s grabbing bits of other people’s work from online sources and mashing them together, plagiarism,” one tertiary student said.

“Most of my mates use Generative AI to do assessments for them without them doing any study unlike the rest of the class, so yeah, I think it’s cheating a little,” a high school student said.

“I only use the AI for an explanation for computing- not an entire solution or submission for my assignments,” another tertiary student added.

“It is just like using a calculator. It may later on be adapted as a normality that schools will have to regulate and be flexible with in the future,” said a high school student.

Interesting…

You can check out more of our articles on artificial intelligence here, or download the report to find out about Gen Zs’ use of Generative AI.

* Curtis, G. J., McNeill, M., Slade, C., Tremayne, K., Harper, R., Rundle, K., & Greenaway, R. (2022). Moving beyond self-reports to estimate the prevalence of commercial contract cheating: an Australian study, Studies in Higher Education, 47(9), 1844-1856. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2021.1972093