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MAVA Colleagues,
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David
The End of Homework? Teachers Grapple with Cheating in the Age of AI
Teachers say generative AI is forcing them to rethink one of school’s oldest institutions.
Two young boys ponder their homework on the electronic calculator at IBM’s Watson Laboratory, 1954 (Getty)
By Greg Toppo
July 14, 2026
At the beginning of each new class, Al Rabanera lets his students know that he knows they’re using AI.
“I’m not going to pretend like you aren’t,” he tells his students. “I know it’s readily available for most of you, if not all of you.”
A math teacher at La Vista High School in Fullerton, California, where he works with students as old as 19 who are struggling to get enough credits to graduate, Rabanera has watched AI creep into homework assignments over the past few years as students use powerful tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini to race through assignments.
It has forced him to change his approach.
He has stopped sending home problems that can be lifted wholesale into an AI chatbot and pasted back into an assignment. Instead, he builds lessons around what students actually care about, creating, for instance, a unit on buying a car that weaves together calculating interest rates and monthly payments with learning about credit scores. He has replaced rote problem sets with one-of-a-kind poster projects and in-class design challenges.
When Rabanera assigns practice, he often has students devise their own word problems around personal interests to prove they understand the underlying concepts.
California math teacher Al Rabanera has replaced assigning rote problem sets with one-of-a-kind poster projects and in-class design challenges, among other assignments. (Courtesy of Al Rabanera)
He’s hardly the only one scrambling to try something new: Nationwide, teachers at all levels are rethinking, scaling back or, in some cases, abandoning homework altogether as evidence mounts that students who outsource their assignments to AI aren’t just submitting work that isn’t theirs. They’re surrendering the cognitive struggle that makes learning stick and makes homework, well, work.
New large-scale research suggests that teachers’ fears are valid. A recent study led by Sina Rismanchian of the University of California, Irvine, analyzed 3.2 million student math problems on the digital ALEKS platform over a decade and found that after ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, high school students spent 31% less time on word problems — the kind easily copy-pasted into an AI — compared with graph-based problems that required a hands-on interaction with the platform. College students showed a 27% decline.
When students were tested under proctored conditions with no access to AI, the copy-paste behavior vanished. And when researchers examined whether students had actually retained anything, they found that the odds of correctly answering AI-susceptible word problems fell by 25% in the post-ChatGPT years.
“Students are using AI a lot,” Rismanchian said in an interview. For those who do, “it’s coming at a cost for their learning outcomes.”
The College Board last fall reported that the percentage of high school students who said they use AI tools for schoolwork grew from 79% in January 2025 to 84% in May 2025.
In a recent survey, 37% of K-12 principals said students were using AI for homework help, slightly higher than the percentage who said students were using it to help draft essays.
John Singleton, an associate professor of economics at the University of Rochester and a co-author of the study, said the finding “certainly requires a rethinking of what the object of homework is.” For him, assigning short writing assignments to his college students is “insane these days, because you’re going to get back 25 AI-generated short essays, and so it’s really not gauging comprehension. It’s not even doing the work of forcing the student to engage with the material, because they can put it into the AI.”
Conscientious instructors are drafting AI policies that they post to class syllabi, he said, “but I think the temptation is there.”
Talking to colleagues, Singleton said, “Everyone feels sort of bewildered about whether they’re doing the right thing.” Moving toward presentations and oral exams make sense but giving up traditional writing assignments as a way to assess student thinking, he said, “is too bad, in some ways.”
Everyone feels sort of bewildered about whether they’re doing the right thing.
John Singleton, University of Rochester
The irony of this moment is that AI was supposed to offer students a powerful tutoring tool, capable of explaining concepts, adapting to individual learners and helping them work through difficult material at their own pace. Instead, many educators say, for a significant share of students it has become the most efficient cheating device ever invented.
“There’s a zillion people that are trying to come up with these guided learning environments and Socratic tutors and stuff like that,” said Justin Reich, director of MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab and host of the AI-focused podcast “The Homework Machine.” “And I’m just like, ‘Guys, you’re putting the “Carefully teach me this stuff” button directly next to the “Do everything for me” button.’ ”
Reich has spent years studying why students cheat. When they’re being honest, they typically tell researchers that the assignment didn’t seem worth their time, or that they ran out of time. They felt pressure to perform, or, in many cases, they found themselves stuck on a problem with no other help in sight.
Guys, you’re putting the ‘Carefully teach me this stuff’ button directly next to the ‘Do everything for me’ button.
Justin Reich, MIT
“What’s new now is that, with all the gen AI stuff, the cost of taking a shortcut is zero,” said Eric Cosyn, a researcher who co-founded the ALEKS platform.
Ashley Kannan, who has taught eighth-grade U.S. history for 30 years in Oak Park, Illinois, said that if schools continue to go down the same path of assigning work and expecting students not to be tempted to take shortcuts, “the war is over — we’ve lost.” Classrooms, he said, will be left in “a race to see who can plagiarize and cheat the best, and who has the resources to do so,” a dynamic he calls a losing bet for everyone.
Start your homework in class
In interviews, many educators and researchers were quick to point out that AI didn’t invent academic dishonesty.
Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Challenge Success, a research and school reform project, has been tracking student cheating behavior for two decades. Long before ChatGPT, she said, copying a classmate’s homework was consistently the most commonly admitted form of academic dishonesty.
The group’s latest academic integrity study, drawn from nearly 30,000 high school students, shows that this pattern still holds: 32.7% of students reported copying someone else’s homework at least once in the past month, a figure almost identical to the share who reported using AI as an unauthorized aid: 32.8%.
Students, Pope said, are simply swapping out one shortcut for another.
“This sort of hand-wringing that AI is changing homework like never before is a little bit off,” she said, “because there were high amounts of copying and cheating homework long before.”
Students are not having the productive struggle that they need to really learn the material.
Denise Pope, Stanford University
All the same, Pope’s team has surveyed more than 100,000 students since November 2022, and the results are unambiguous: They’re using AI to do homework. Many don’t frame it as cheating, making the case that consulting an AI is no different than asking a parent, calling a tutor or typing a question into Google. Echoing Reich’s findings, she noted, “Some of them are saying it’s another piece of technology that helps us when we’re stuck.”
Teachers, naturally, see it a bit differently. A Challenge Success survey of 678 faculty and staff members found that the most pervasive concern, raised by about 58% of respondents, wasn’t cheating itself but the erosion of critical thinking. Teachers complained that students aren’t developing the intellectual stamina that hard problems require. “If school is about skills and not content,” one teacher wrote, “ChatGPT takes away critical thinking skills at a time that we are supposed to be teaching those skills to the students.”
Pope said her group is hearing from teachers that they’re afraid to send homework home “because it’s even more clear that there’s this ‘Easy’ button, and students are not having the productive struggle that they need to really learn the material.”
She recommends rethinking homework, starting with what she calls a homework audit — a systematic review of assignments to ask whether they actually require a student to do the intellectual work required. Teachers should also be able to tell if the work was done by the student or by AI.
“Start your homework in class,” she advised. “You will get a really good picture of who understands what you’re asking and who doesn’t by looking around and seeing what happens in the first 10 minutes — one kid is done and one kid is still stuck.”
Kannan, the Illinois history teacher, has landed on a similar idea, built around conversations. He still assigns a version of the same paragraph students have long written to identify a historical figure and place them in context — but the process now unfolds through one-on-one conferences rather than solo writing. Because of the conferences, the writing looks different.
The goal, he said, is to locate the assignment “in the hearts and minds of a student” rather than in a generic prompt that AI can complete on command. “I think that there’s a way to personalize rigor,” he said. “When students, when young people feel that something is personal to them, they do come alive.”
Illinois history teacher Ashley Kannan says he now builds homework writing assignments around one-on-one conferences that help ground the writing “in the hearts and minds of a student” rather than in a generic prompt that AI can complete on command. (Courtesy of Ashley Kannan)
Kannan said this kind of individualization isn’t new — special education teachers and speech-language pathologists have practiced it for decades. “All I’m suggesting is that there are pathways that we know work. Why not bring it into the mainstream classroom for every student?”
‘How this could this stronger?’
Researchers are also grappling with the limits of what they can measure. Self-reported cheating data, as Rismanchian’s paper notes, is “the least reliable way to measure anything.” In his own earlier research on 70 undergraduates, more than half of students who were directly observed relying on AI denied using it. “We were actually observing this copy-pasting behavior,” he recalled.
A group of McGraw-Hill researchers co-authored the Rismanchian study, and Dylan Arena, the publisher’s chief of data science, said solving the AI cheating problem has two prongs: Better detection helps, but it’s insufficient without a cultural shift inside classrooms. Students who believe their sole obligation is to produce a completed assignment, he said, will always find the path of least resistance.
“There are kids who are here thinking, ‘I need to punch my ticket, I need to get this thing done,’ ” Arena said. “What’s the most expedient way to do that? Hand it over to this tool.”
But he suggested that something deeper is actually happening as AI colonizes students’ thinking: They’re losing their tolerance for “not knowing” something at any given moment, for what he calls the productive discomfort of sitting with a hard problem before the answer becomes clear. “It used to be that we would spend weeks not fully understanding something, and we would read, and we would write, and we would talk, and we would try, and we would write drafts — and they wouldn’t be quite right. But there is now an expectation that I either instantly know what I should do, or I should turn to a tool.”
A few teachers are experimenting with a more informal version of that transparency, built on relationships rather than documentation.
Kannan described pulling aside a student last year whom he suspected, based on months of conversation, of leaning on AI for most of his schoolwork. “I knew that because I was taking the time to talk to him,” Kannan said.
Rather than report the student, he asked him to run his own writing through the same chatbot he’d been using, in a bid to “reverse-engineer” and improve it. “Let’s actually ask questions to ChatGPT about how this could be stronger? How is this weak?”
Kannan has since built that move into his regular teaching: After students draft work with AI’s help, he sometimes has them ask the tool to critique the output, with students in effect “co-designing” assignments rather than simply handing them to a chatbot and turning in whatever pops out.
In the absence of such guidance, he said, students will do what they must to complete assignments. He recalled a student who’d been assigned an essay on the American dream by an English teacher. “There was really no instruction as to what that was, and she said, ‘I carried on a conversation with Gemini about what the American dream was, and that helped me understand it more.’ Given the demands of what the student was facing, she used AI as a partner, as an opportunity.”
Tom Loveless, a longtime education researcher who has studied homework, noted that teachers have been assigning less homework for at least a decade — and that the rise of AI might reduce it further if teachers lose confidence that take‑homework is genuinely done by students. But it could also work the other way: If teachers believe that AI is a kind of all-purpose helper, they could actually assign more homework because they believe students “are going to be helped out and kind of semi-tutored,” he said.
Many school districts are trying to reframe the relationship between students and AI from the ground up. The Laguna Beach Unified School District in California, working with researchers at Stanford, found that AI policies had generated a culture of suspicion in which teachers spent their energy trying to catch cheaters — and students felt guilty for using AI.
Michael Morrison, the district’s former chief technology officer, called it “the absolute worst culture that I can think of.”
In response, the district developed an add-on tool for Google Docs called AI Trust You, which asks students to disclose exactly how much and in what ways they use AI on a given assignment — a kind of nutritional label for AI-assisted work. Surveys suggest students generally use it honestly because the tool gives them something they didn’t have before: a sanctioned way to tell the truth.
Michael Keller, Laguna’s director of social-emotional support, noted that the district is already rethinking homework altogether for high school students, since 70% are athletes who devote an hour or more each day to practice and training.
He sees the AI initiative as part of a broader commitment to treating students as full partners in their own learning. Monitoring how students are using AI, he said, is not the point. “We really view it as our moral obligation to make sure that we put trust and supportive relationships as the foundation to their learning experience,” he said.
For MIT’s Reich, transparency is necessary but not sufficient. The deeper challenge is motivational. “Kids are just natural boundary pushers,” he said.
And though they may not be able to articulate this, “the boundaries are what make them feel safe and loved and cared for.”
The problem, Reich argues, isn’t that students are weak-willed or morally deficient. It’s that the incentive structure of homework — grades for completion, not for thinking — has always been fragile. AI has simply exposed that fragility.
“It’s not like homework is perfect,” he said. “Any teacher will tell you that some of the assignments are dumb or don’t work. But across the tens of millions of minutes of stuff that we ask kids to do in the afternoons, some of it’s got to be useful. And if we turn that spigot off, there’s just going to be less learning.”
David J. Ferreira
CommunicationsCoordinator
Massachusetts Association of Vocational Administrators (MAVA)
Davidferreira
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