An open letter to my students: I know what you are up to
Dear Students,
For years, tens of thousands of educated Kenyans made a living writing papers for college students in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere. At its peak, the shadow industry employed an estimated 40,000 people in Nairobi alone. Business boomed. Essay writers drove new Subarus, carried the latest smartphones, and booked exclusive tables at clubs—all from doing students’ homework.
Then ChatGPT arrived (and then Gemini, Claude, and Grok), and some of you made a simple calculation: why pay a stranger in Nairobi when a chatbot does it for free?
The Kenyan essay mill is collapsing. But cheating isn’t declining. It’s just gotten faster and cheaper, with even better results.
I recently spoke with a former student—someone sharp, honest, and well-connected among his peers. I asked him what percentage of students cheat in some way, shape, or form.
His answer: ninety-five percent.
I almost didn’t share that number. Here’s why.
Social proof is a powerful force in human behavior, often more powerful than rules, penalties, or my disappointed mug. When you learn that nearly everyone around you is cheating, cheating stops feeling like deviance and starts feeling like common sense. The honest student becomes a sucker. In short, by telling you this, I risk making the problem worse.
Here I am anyway, because pretending it isn’t happening isn’t helping.
Even if ninety-five percent is too high, the real number is high. Research finds that more than sixty percent of university students admit to cheating in some form, and some studies put the number closer to eighty percent.
The point isn’t the exact figure. The point is that the existing carrots and sticks aren’t stopping it. Honor codes aren’t stopping it. Turnitin isn’t stopping it. Threats of punishment aren’t stopping it.
The system encourages cheating
Most of you aren’t cheating because you’re bad people. You’re cheating because it’s easy, useful, and sometimes rational.
College has become a machine for continuous assessment. When I was a student, plenty of classes had a midterm and a final. That was it. Now you’re juggling assignments, papers, projects, presentations, discussion posts, quizzes, and class participation across five courses at once. Many of you are also working—not for beer money, but to pay rent. Oh yeah, and you are supposed to be young and have fun along the way.
The volume is relentless.
So when a chatbot can knock out a three-page response paper in forty-two seconds, the calculation may have very little to do with ethics. You have twelve things to do and enough time to do eight of them. Something has to give.
Grades make the calculation even easier. Universities say learning is the goal, but grades are the currency. Grades help determine internships, jobs, graduate-school admissions, scholarships, and honors. Nobody asks to see your neural pathways in a job interview.
What gets measured gets maximized. The grade is supposed to indicate learning. But once the grade becomes the thing you need, you start optimizing for the grade rather than the learning.
Of course you do. You’re not stupid.
Then there’s moral wiggle room. “Everyone does it.” “The assignment was busywork anyway.” “I could do it just as well, but AI does it faster.” Each story creates just enough distance from the act to cheat without having to think of yourself as a cheater.
And that leaves us with an ugly equilibrium: students who do the work are competing against students who outsource it, students have good reasons to keep quiet, and professors have good reasons not to look too closely.
What I’m doing
I’m not going to blame you. The system is broken, and you’re responding to the system. I’d rather fix the game than scold the players.
First, I am not anti-AI. I built a custom GPT for my Consumer Behavior class, and we will use AI tools to execute marketing tactics—from building campaigns to working with CRM systems. I want you to use these remarkable tools, and I want you to use them well.
But I’m not going to install surveillance software. I’m not going to use AI detectors. They’re unreliable, and they create an adversarial arms race I have no interest in joining.
And I’m not going to give you another sermon about academic integrity.
For me, this letter isn’t a revolution. It’s an evolution.
For years, my Consumer Behavior class has been built around two things that are already difficult to fake: in-person exams and class performance.
Class performance. A meaningful portion of your grade comes from how you show up in the room—your participation, your questions, the quality of your thinking in real time. I evaluate it.
You cannot outsource presence.
Written exams. You will take exams in class, on paper, with a pen. No devices. No AI. No bathroom breaks with a phone in your pocket. Just you and what you actually know.
Old-fashioned? Maybe. Hard to fake? Very.
What I’m changing is the third piece.
I’m getting rid of most of the small assignments. Ten little homework tasks scattered across a semester are an invitation to cut corners. In their place: fewer, bigger projects that look more like real work.
Projects with an oral defense. This is the new part—and the important part.
You can use any resource available to you, including AI. But you will have to defend your work. In person. To me—and maybe to a small panel of businesspeople, if I can convince enough of them to volunteer.
I’ll ask how you arrived at your conclusions. I’ll ask you to explain your reasoning. I’ll ask you to riff on your own argument.
If you did the work, this should be a good conversation.
If you didn’t, it will be a very short one.
There is also something psychologically different about cheating to someone’s face. The oral defense also changes the cost-benefit math. Right now, cheating offers a big reward with a low probability of getting caught. An oral defense makes the consequences immediate and vivid.
More importantly, it mirrors how the real world works. Nobody submits a strategy deck and disappears. You present it. People ask questions. If you can’t defend it, the polish of your slides is irrelevant.
So the oral defense isn’t punishment. It’s training.
Will some of you be nervous? Good.
A final thought
I’ve spent my career studying why people make the choices they do. I know that incentives matter more than intentions. I know that norms are contagious. And I know that systems designed to optimize grades invite gaming.
So I’m updating my course with a simple goal: make learning the best way to earn a good grade.
Onwards!
Peter McGraw
PS: Previous letters in this series: Read books, please. Write it or regret it. Never surrender! Create more. Consume less. Are you the hero in your life’s story? Are you a dog or a wolf?