(435) How to Do Academic Integrity Wrong, Courtesy of Western University in Canada

Plus, a student says, "I have an A because I use Chat."

May 28, 2026

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Western University, Professor Badly Bungle Cheating

Sent in by a reader, this story, reported by CTV, has to be the worst I’ve seen in quite some time. It’s amazing and horrifying.

It begins with cheating — at Western University (The University of Western Ontario) in Canada:

A Western University professor alleges most students in one of his classes used artificial intelligence to cheat on their final exam.

Nothing at all about that is, or ought to be, a surprise.

The professor is Jacob Shelley, who teaches as, or in, “Faculty of Law and the School of Health Studies.” So, law and health. No reason to worry about cheating there. But, according to his bio page:

Dr. Shelley is a co-director of the Health Ethics, Law & Policy (HELP) Lab at Western.

Law, health, and ethics. Because of course.

Anyway:

Shelley says he is convinced the majority of the 288 students in his health-care law course cheated on their April 24 final exam using AI.

A majority. Again, no surprise.

And when a professor says they believe — are convinced, allege — that cheating happens, I default to believing them. I trust their subject expertise and experience with students, unlike Western University. More on this in a minute.

But first:

The exam was worth 30 per cent of students’ final mark.
It was intended to be closed-book and completed independently, with no use of external sources. The exam included both written answers and multiple-choice questions.
“I had eight per cent of my class receive 100 per cent on the multiple choice. Fifty-five per cent scored over 90 per cent. I’ve never seen marks like that in 20 years of teaching,” Shelley said.

Twenty years of teaching and the professor seems pretty confident in his conclusions, or at least suspicions. CTV has video coverage of this story on the link above, which I think is worth the three minutes to hear Shelley explain some of the indications of cheating he found in this exam.

But here is where this story starts to get crazy. The professor said:

he decided not to use proctoring software because he believes it does not prevent cheating.

How’s that working?

Never mind you that this makes no sense. If watching people did not deter misconduct, no one would install security cameras. Not ever. Also, students regularly say proctoring prevents cheating (see Issue 45). But even more simply, if not using it isn’t successful — maybe it’s time for a rethink.

On point, the story quotes “tech expert and commentator Carmi Levy,” who says:

“And an unproctored exam online is almost like an invitation to use these [AI] tools,” he said.

I don’t understand how any educator does not understand this. There is far more cost to giving a remote, unsupervised assessment than there is giving no assessment at all. It’s not simply that unsupervised online assessments are useless, it’s that they’re actually dangerous and destructive because of the message they send about integrity, fairness, effort, and rigor.

To reset, we have a professor who does not secure his exams and found that, strongly suspected that, more than half his class cheated. From there, the article says that the professor decided not to count the grades from the assessment he believed as compromised:

Shelley says he decided not to use the exam results toward final grades, even though administrators instructed him otherwise — a compromise to his integrity he was not willing to make.

I’m sorry - what?

Did I read that right? That the school wanted the professor to count the grades anyway, despite that he was “convinced” there was cheating? Yes, I did:

Shelley says that in the end, and against his wishes, Western decided to include the multiple-choice portion of the exam in final grades.

I am stunned. As in, I cannot believe this.

If you set out to write a manual for how not to handle academic integrity — this is it. Don’t secure your exams, essentially inviting students to cheat. When they do, and the teacher knows it, the school ignores it and forces the grades to count anyway.

Never mind the integrity of the course, the assessment of learning, the credibility of the grade, the credit, and the degree. That’s gone. But worse, trust of honest students is gone too. Why bother doing the work? Respect from those who cheated? Gone also. They may have suspected the test was a joke, given how it was handled. But now they know for sure.

Trust and respect from your professors? You’re kidding, right? It does not get any worse than a professor who contextualizes his position in terms of his ethics and the school doesn’t care, siding instead with cheating students.

Shelly’s words:

“The message I received is that we don’t trust your judgment. We don’t care about your ethics. We care about getting marks out to students because that’s what they paid for, and we’re going to turn a blind eye to concerns about cheating,” he said.

In my view, his negligence was the first problem. But I absolutely cannot argue with this. I’m surprised he did not quit. I’d like to think I would have.

What’s true here either way is that, as he said, Western is “going to turn a blind eye to concerns about cheating.” Not going to, did.

Western is not alone. In more than a decade of covering, reading, and writing about academic integrity, my best guess is that something like 70% of schools prefer the “blind eye” approach to integrity. Which means they don’t have any.

Snapping back, let’s also consider that what the professor wanted to do here was to not count the grade — just not count it. Not assign a zero to suspected cheaters. Not initiate formal inquiries. Just not count a test he believed was compromised. If we’re to believe the reporting, the school said to count it anyway.

The school put out a statement:

Western is aware of Dr. Shelley’s claims of cheating during a final exam.
We take all measures to protect academic integrity, and we have robust policies in place to address scholastic offences.
Any student found to have committed a scholastic offence should expect appropriate consequences for their actions.
Together with instructors, Western investigates suspected instances of cheating or academic dishonesty when there is some kind of tangible evidence with which to investigate. To date, Dr. Shelley hasn’t shared any such evidence, and we continue to encourage him to do so.
Leaders at the university have been fully engaged in this matter to find an appropriate resolution for all students in this course.

I note the use of “Shelly’s claims,” which is dismissive and patronizing. I also note the school saying that they, “take all measures to protect academic integrity,” which is not true. The school allows unprotected remote assessments and overrides faculty expertise. Western, I’ll remind you here, turned off its AI detection software and in 2024, had 11 student cases of cheating with AI (see Issue 332). Eleven. The published enrollment is 42,000.

As for “robust policies,” I ask the same question to Western about that as I did to Dr. Shelley — how are those working for you? Policies without enforcement are worse than no policies at all.

I also note that the school wants “some kind of tangible evidence.” That sounds fine, but it also makes clear that the expertise of the people they hire to teach does not meet that criteria. If you watched the CTV video interview, you know how dumb that is. Putting the “prove it” on the teacher is code for “go away.”

And finally, the school is quite direct in saying they want a resolution “for all students.” Not for the professor, or for the integrity of the school, but for the students. That’s the “appropriate resolution” they want. And, it seems, the resolution they got.

And yes, most of this could have been avoided had Dr. Shelley secured his exams in the first place. Fewer students would have cheated and, for those who did, he may have been able to provide "some kind of tangible evidence,” since his word and experience were not enough.

The entire episode stinks. Of all the ways to have handled this, from start to finish, this was the worst one.

I’ll end with another quote from Levy, the technology expert:

“All schools need to figure this out and they need to do it quickly, because otherwise their very brands could be at risk of being compromised. If you cannot trust that the integrity of the degree that you grant is unimpeachable, then the value of that degree is diminished on the open market,” he said.

Not could be, are. Not if, when.

When schools, and professors, make it this clear that they simply don’t care enough to do anything about very credibly indicated cheating, when they blind eye as much as they possibly can, the party is already over.

“I have an A because I use Chat”

Great reporting by Nanette Asimov from The San Francisco Chronicle (subscription required) tells us what I suspect we already know but can be reminded — students are cheating with AI.

I regret sharing so much of this outstanding reporting here. But I find it important and ask that, if you can, you visit The Chronicle and consider subscribing. Journalists and publishers need to be rewarded for work like this. It’s neither easy nor free.

The coverage starts with the groundwork — that schools prohibit cheating, that it’s up to professors to set policies on AI in their classes and remind students what is, or is not, allowed. Fair enough. And also:

reminding students they are still required to produce their own work.

True. But, sure. Good luck with that.

Numbers and Stories

Anyway, the reporting continues:

But not all students appear to be checking the rules. Conversations with a dozen of them at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State yielded story after story about how they parcel out their reading and writing to machines, leaving open the question of what they are actually learning.
“I have an A because I use Chat,” a San Francisco State psychology major said of her statistics grade. “If there’s a math problem, instead of me trying to study for a class I don’t really care about, Chat will just solve the problem for me.”

It’s not a question of checking the rules. They know the rules. They don’t care. And they don’t care because nothing ever happens when the rules are broken, ignored. The key has always been the phrase, “I don’t really care.” No reason they should.

It continues:

Two of the 12 students interviewed at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State said they abstained from AI altogether, citing the technology’s excessive use of water and energy in one case, and an unwillingness to “lose my voice” in the other. Four students said they used it only for legitimate, tutoring purposes — to explain math and science complexities or to quiz themselves — and never to do their work for them.
But six said they use AI to do some or most of their work, with some insisting that this isn’t cheating. Others said that it is. Some criticized professors for prohibiting AI, while others claimed their instructors don’t actually want them to do the assigned reading and are fine with AI-generated summaries.

Given that people don’t like to admit to disfavored behavior, especially to someone’s face, AI use for “some or most of their work” is probably more than six in 12. But even if it is not, we’re still talking about half. Just so we’re clear.

I also find it hard to believe that instructors don’t want students to read. Feels like a dose of rationalization to me. At the same time, I can see why students may think that. When you don’t read, and use AI for vapid summaries, nothing happens. Easy to see how that can be internalized as permission, or, at worst, apathy.

“I know it’s cheating, and I do feel a little oof about it,” a San Francisco State freshman said as she bit into a burrito in the student union.
She types her notes into ChatGPT then asks it to turn them into polished assignments for English and communications classes.
“It’s basically what I submit. I’ll say, this sounds a little robot-y, so I’ll tweak it a little,” she said. “But it’s getting my stuff done, so I don’t feel horrible about it.”

Still more:

At UC Berkeley, a junior majoring in media studies said she relies on AI for all assignments.
“The heavy lifting I use AI for is my reading,” she said, naming a site that turns reading material into short podcasts that she listens to before class. “Kind of like, abridged.”
What about using AI for her writing? “Yeah, 10 out of 10” assignments, she said. “Though I try not to plagiarize off ChatGPT.”
Her definition of “plagiarize,” at least, was hers alone.
She’ll have a “big sploosh of ideas,” which she types into Chat. “I’ll be like, can you condense my ideas into a few sentences? And it will. I’ll usually copy what it says. I’ll consider it mine because they’re my ideas,” she said.

Berkeley. Nice.

And yet more:

At San Francisco State, a student majoring in speech and language said she couldn’t remember the last book she had read for school, though she had recently been assigned at least three.
“We weren’t supposed to read the books,” the student claimed. “Just summarize them.”
To achieve this, she used two AI sites: one to summarize, and the second to ask whether the summaries were good enough.
The second site told her the summary of “The Glass Castle,” a memoir, needed more work.
“For that one, I did not really understand,” the student said. So she returned to the first site and told it to do a better job.
“Everybody uses” it, she said. “Since high school. It’s like a tool.”

How anyone is expected to “just summarize” while not reading the books is a mystery to me.

Bigger picture, every time I read stuff like this, I wonder whose name is going to be on the diploma and exactly what set of skills or competencies will the diploma attest that these students have? As far as I know, none of these schools offer a degree in telling the AI to do a better job because another AI said to.

Dumb Things to Say

You may think that a section titled “dumb things to say” refers to AI-using students. But, no. Not here. This section is about, and from, the folks at the schools, with a few very strong contenders for 2026 Quote of the Year.

Here’s one:

“We take the challenges seriously,” said [Ahmet] Palazoglu of the [University of California] Academic Senate. “The answer is not to pretend AI does not exist, but to be clear about what constitutes real learning. To redesign learning assessments where needed, and to have frank conversations with students about why doing the work themselves matters.”

Someone, anyone, please tell me who is suggesting that we pretend AI does not exist. And “frank conversations.” Sure. Please allow me to restate from above — the students do not care. And they won’t, unless and until you make them care.

Another:

The university must “help students see that abuse of AI’s capabilities simply undermines their ability to take full advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said Oliver O’Reilly, UC Berkeley’s vice provost for undergraduate education. “When students cheat, they only cheat themselves.”

Help students see — sure. Good luck.

And if you’ve read The Cheat Sheet for any time at all, you know that “cheaters only cheat themselves” enrages me. It’s not true. Cheaters cheat their classmates, their professors, alumni, taxpayers, the school itself, and the public at large.

Yes, this is hyperbole. I cop to that. But this view has all the logical consistency of saying that people who commit crimes usually go to jail and therefore are only hurting themselves. I just can’t.

You want more? Here you are:

Pointing out that California State University has proudly gone all-in on AI, the story notes that:

CSU released “Ahead of the Curve,” a report on AI use that surveyed 80,626 students and 13,434 faculty and staff across its 22 campuses.
Nearly 80% of the students said they would not submit AI-generated work as their own. That left more than 16,000 students, about 20%, who did not check that box.
“Most students are not using AI to cheat,” said Jason Maymon, a CSU spokesperson. “The idea that AI is driving a widespread increase in academic dishonesty at the CSU or in higher education is misleading.”

A few things here that should be obvious. One, people saying they would not do something is no proxy for whether they do that thing. People say they won’t cheat on their taxes, or on their spouses, or speed in a school zone. But they do. Every single day.

And there is no way that Jason Maymon knows whether what he said is true. For the record, it’s not true. But my point is that I am sure he just made that up, that it’s based on nothing — except perhaps a desire to defend AI at CSU. The idea that AI is driving a widespread increase in cheating, at CSU and elsewhere, is beyond well established. Denying it is not a good look.

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