![\"Students](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1781288502_981_.jpeg\")
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Students walk about the UCLA campus in Westwood.<\/p>\n
(Robert Gauthier \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
Ambiguity and contradictions, higher education experts say, are at the heart of the conflict at many campuses where AI policy is left to individual instructors seeking to encourage its ethical use while preserving academic integrity<\/a> \u2014 as the technology evolves faster than university rules.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a messy environment,\u201d said Lee Rainie, who directs Elon University\u2019s Imagining the Digital Future Center. The underlying issue is trust, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a sense that students think faculty are using it and not disclosing it, and faculty think students are using it and not disclosing it,\u201d he said. Over multiple surveys<\/a> he has found no consensus<\/a> on what counts as cheating with AI.<\/p>\n The AI cheating conundrum<\/p>\n Igor Chirikov, a researcher at UC Berkeley\u2019s Center for Studies in Higher Education who co-led a report published this year that is the largest study of undergraduate AI use<\/a>, said the prevalence of the technology in the classroom \u2014 and questions about what constitutes cheating \u2014 are rapidly growing.<\/p>\n Of more than 95,000 students at 20 public research universities he surveyed in spring 2024, about two-thirds had used AI for classwork and one-third used it regularly. An additional 9% of users said they had used it to cheat, such as writing a paper with the assistance of AI when it was not allowed or tasking AI with solving a math assignment. <\/p>\n A student walks through campus on an early morning at the University of California, Berkeley on Thursday, February 19, 2026.<\/p>\n (Christina House \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n But Chirikov noted that AI tools were less common two years ago, and said he had unpublished 2026 data that found AI use has mushroomed to 80%.<\/p>\n Chirikov did not survey about cheating, false accusations or discipline practices this year. But he said the nature of cheating has shifted. University conduct officers have told him that plagiarism cases are being replaced by AI-based cases \u201cthat are much more difficult to prove.\u201d<\/p>\n Failed assignments suspected of being AI generated and integrity hearings over alleged cheating have spawned an industry of academic AI-defense lawyers \u2014 and an evolving student playbook for how to fight back or avoid discipline.<\/p>\n The fallout has hit hardest upon students who said they did not use AI and were accused because of a professor\u2019s suspicion or detection software that researchers have found can produce false-positives, especially on writing by non-native English speakers<\/a>.<\/p>\n Turnitin<\/a>, one of the most common AI checkers, says its scanner is wrong less than 1% of the time but warns \u201cthere is still a small risk of false positives.\u201d Other studies, including ones from University of Pennsylvania <\/a>academics and European researchers,<\/a> have found higher failure rates among the plethora of commonly used AI-scanning apps. <\/p>\n A UCLA Humanities Technology article last year warned<\/a> that detection tools are \u201cdeeply flawed\u201d due to false positives, can rely on older AI technologies than the current chatbots and raise \u201cthe fundamental question of whether we should be using AI to catch AI.\u201d<\/p>\n Mirrors and body movements UCLA student Titi Olotu took an online class featuring unusual AI monitoring. <\/p>\n (Robert Gauthier \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n Titi Olotu, a UCLA junior with an accommodation through UCLA\u2019s Center for Accessible Education, was weighing whether to drop the sociology professor\u2019s course when the mirror email arrived. Her accommodation called for brief snack breaks during exams and the option to write down notes on paper. Olotu said she felt the online proctoring treated any movement as suspect.<\/p>\n \u201cAny little thing, moving, breathing, talking, looking, is cheating,\u201d Olotu said. She dropped the class.<\/p>\n The UCLA professor did not respond to requests for an interview. A spokesperson said the school \u201ctakes student concerns seriously\u201d and has processes for reviewing student-faculty conflicts but does not discuss individual cases.<\/p>\n While lock-down browsers and sharing screen videos are common in online exams, mirrors and body movement restrictions are more extreme. But students and experts said it is all a reflection of the chaos, confusion and fear a new technology has wreaked upon the classroom. <\/p>\n \u201cIt just felt so degrading,\u201d said Ashley, another UCLA sociology student who studied under the same professor, who required students to show their arms and hands. A UCLA junior, she said she faced accusations of plagiarism, incorrect citations and suspiciously short intervals for Google Docs time stamps after she said she drafted assignments in a separate notes app and pasted them in the day they were due.<\/p>\n Online message boards are full of student complaints about policies gone too far, such as proctoring software that uses keystroke patterns, eye-movement tracking<\/a> or facial scans to detect if students are using AI prompts<\/a>. <\/p>\n The student playbook Students walk past the John Wooden statue outside Pauley Pavilion on the UCLA campus.<\/p>\n (Robert Gauthier \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n Some students have built their own defenses. Ivan Ornelas, who graduated from UC San Diego last month with a bachelor\u2019s in neuroscience, said he never used AI but composed every paper in Google Docs so the version history would show his work.<\/p>\n \u201cYou could see every small thing, every copy and paste, every edit,\u201d he said. He began to scrub what he described as \u201cAI tells\u201d \u2014 em dashes, cliches and vague statements \u2014 from his writing to avoid accusations.<\/p>\n Aldan Creo, a master\u2019s student in data science at UC San Diego, took similar measures. He said he was accused of using AI on a math assignment last November because his explanations of his process were unusually detailed. His grade was docked by half before he made an appeal during the professor\u2019s office hours.<\/p>\n Since then, he said, \u201cI will change the way I explain things and just make it look a little bit more careless and unprofessional. … I don\u2019t like doing that but I just felt it was the only thing that I could do to be on the safe side.\u201d <\/p>\n Adrienne Hahn, the Los Angeles-based attorney who represents students at California campuses, said defending against AI accusations is the area of education cases where her firm is \u201cgrowing at the fastest speed.\u201d<\/p>\n She has seen cases where instructors refer more than half a class for AI violations to campus academic conduct boards. In one case, Hahn said, a professor failed a student for using a math formula she learned in a different class. \u201cHe thought, well, I haven\u2019t taught you this formula, and you didn\u2019t cite it, so you must have learned this from AI,\u201d said Hahn, managing attorney and founder of the Hahn Legal Group APC<\/a>. The F was removed after Hahn\u2019s firm intervened.<\/p>\n Hahn tells students to always gather evidence: texts with friends about late nights in the library or in their dorms, study notes and Google Docs or Microsoft Word version histories.<\/p>\n \u201cThe stress, the money, the delays in their education, possibly for false accusations, is horrific,\u201d Hahn said.<\/p>\n Tricia Bertram Gallant<\/a>, who directs academic integrity at UC San Diego, urged caution when describing the rapidly changing cheating environment, saying it reflects how poorly prepared colleges are to deal with AI use in classrooms.<\/p>\n \u201cI would argue against the verbiage of \u2018falsely accused,\u2019 \u201d said Gallant, who is the former president of the International Center for Academic Integrity and co-wrote \u201cThe Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI.\u201d \u201cWhat students may really mean is that the university did not have a policy or procedures or those weren\u2019t followed.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1781288504_968_.jpeg\")
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