Colleges and Universities
The new college virtue isn’t about if you cheat, but how well | Opinion
We’re witnessing a move away from a culture that valued honor and integrity toward one where ambition and prestige are the only markers of worth. Call it ‘striver culture.’
Natalie SandovalUSA TODAY
July 20, 2026, 5:06 a.m. ET
There’s a new morality emerging in the corridors of America’s finest universities: If you’re not cheating, you’re a sucker
Look no further than Brown University, where an artificial intelligence cheating scandal has rattled longtime economics professor Roberto Serrano. This spring, after three decades of teaching at Brown, Serrano let his students take their midterm exam at home, upping the difficulty to compensate for the unlimited time. The average score, which had historically run between 65% and 80%, jumped to 96%
Was that a particularly studious class? Maybe. But Serrano suspected a simpler explanation: AI
He announced that the final would be given in person, causing 18 students to drop the class. Nine more didn’t bother showing up for the exam
The average score on the final was 48.6%
Serrano shared the anonymized results of the 59 students who took both tests with Inside Higher Ed. A handful can be safely called honest. One scored 95.5% on the midterm and 95% on the final. Another went from 55% to 59%, the only student whose score actually improved
Many more students fell from highs in the top percentile to failing grades. Two who submitted perfect midterm exams scored exactly 0% on the final.
A culture of cheating: ‘Everybody does it’
Serrano’s students are hardly outliers
A recent survey of more than 95,000 undergraduates at 20 American public research universities estimated that 9% used generative AI to cheat
Among daily AI users, that rate jumped to 26%
Amy Clukey, an associate professor at the University of Louisville, estimated that more than half her students in one online course had committed AI-facilitated plagiarism
Clukey told The Chronicle of Higher Education that cheating had become a culture: “It’s not just an individual student, one out of an entire class or two out of the entire class. It is so many. And when I talk to some undergrads, they’re like, ‘Everybody does it.’ “
Amanda Gregg, an associate professor at Middlebury College, told The Chronicle that her students “acknowledge that there is not a culture of social sanctions against cheating.” Gregg recalled that when she was a student, cheaters faced “major social sanctions.” When she mentioned this to her own students, she said, they were “shocked.”
Rise of ‘striver culture’ in higher education
What happened? AI makes cheating easier, certainly. But as Clukey and Gregg suggest, its rise is downstream from a cultural shift in higher education
We’re witnessing a move away from a culture that valued honor and integrity (think of the social conditions that once made “a man of his word” mean something) toward one where ambition and prestige are the only markers of worth. Call it “striver culture.” To a striver, the ends always justify the means
To be a striver is to be concerned with the appearance of prestige above all else. It means attending the high-status school, getting the high-status job, being friends with high-status people.
Consider Stanford University, where nearly 40% of students receive disability accommodations ‒ extra time on tests, excused absences, and priority in choosing on-campus housing. Stanford undergraduate Elsa Johnson disclosed recently that among her peers, it’s an open secret how easy accommodations are to get
Students “openly discuss, strategise, and even joke” about them, Johnson wrote in The Sunday Times. “At a university of savvy optimisers, the feeling is that if you aren’t getting accommodations, you haven’t tried hard enough.”
In other words: There is no virtue in being an honest loser
This mindset is hardly confined to Silicon Valley. The number of students who qualify for disability accommodations has “more than tripled over the past eight years” at the University of Chicago, and it has “nearly quintupled over the past 15 years” at University of California, Berkeley, according to The Atlantic
One can only imagine what those numbers will look like in a decade or two if universities keep refusing to crack down on illegitimate disability claims. A soft-on-scamming policy suggests administrators are gullible, apathetic or simply unwilling to see their students clearly
What’s most remarkable is not that undergraduates would cheat, or even consider cheating. It’s that they’ve assigned moral value to swindling others and getting away with it
Natalie Sandoval graduated from Columbia University in 2024 with a degree in English. She is a USA TODAY Opinion fellow through the Intercollegiate Studies Institute
