The day before a take-home exam in my undergraduate course at Wharton, a few students sent me frantic messages that some of their peers were planning to use artificial intelligence to cheat. When the 95 students logged in for the exam, they got a surprise. I asked them to write an essay on how to motivate students to stop cheating. Their responses shocked me. A majority made excuses: We're under a lot of stress. Everyone else is doing it. They sounded like major league baseball players in the steroid era. Chat GPT was their performance-enhancing drug.

As schools confront this problem, many teachers are switching to in-class essays and oral exams. Creating obstacles is never going to be enough. We need to get at the root of the problem by changing students' underlying motivations. Psychologists have found that as the stakes of a competitive challenge go up, cheating does, too. Some people are largely immune to this effect. They ask themselves: What's the right thing for someone like me to do? They have strong moral identities.

Extensive evidence shows that moral identity can help people resist the temptation to cheat. When people have strong moral identities, they view unethical behavior as a violation of their own values. The best way to instill it is to get students to consistently think about the ethical consequences of their actions. Many schools try to activate moral identity by asking students to follow an honor code. Integrity oaths are frequently ineffective — and sometimes they backfire. In one experiment, asking students to sign an honesty pledge before an exam doubled the rate of cheating.

Last year when I surveyed students at elite universities about their views of cheating, plenty of them admitted to doing it to get into college, and they signed the survey using their full names. A.I. hasn't just made cheating harder to catch. It's made cheating so effortless, enticing and available that many students no longer believe it's wrong. One Ivy League student wrote, 'Cheating is a creative expression and a form of problem solving.'