Unpopular Opinion: Let College Students Cheat with ChatGPT

Sarah and I talked about this ChatGPT stuff on the Secret pod, in addition to talking about Harvard, LaMonica McIver, and Trump’s South Africa meeting.

The show is here.

1. Get Off My Lawn

We talked about this New York magazine story briefly yesterday, but I want to go deep on it today. Short version: Kids in high school and college are using AI to do their homework, write their essays, and take their tests at a scale you can’t believe.

Cheating with ChatGPT in 2025 is like smoking pot in 1975. Everyone is doing it.

Is this good? Or bad? I have complicated thoughts. And what I really want from today is a conversation with you guys, in the comments.

Let’s ride.

Cards on the table: My college experience looked absolutely nothing like what is described in this piece.

The New York article talks almost exclusively with students who write papers and essays.

I wrote one paper in college. It was for a graduate-level immunobiology course and it was highly technical. I can’t be certain, but I do not believe I read a single book in college. Not a real book, anyway. Textbooks and scientific articles? Sure. I went through them by the dozen. But a book with prose in it?

Zero.

I spent all of my time in labs and working on problem sets. Math. P-chem. Orgo. Physics. We’d have problem sets to turn in every week. Tests a couple times a semester. And then finals.

ChatGPT would have been of no use to me. I could have used AI to help with problem sets, I suppose. But then I would have had to check everything by hand anyway, since these were questions with right and wrong answers. And the exams?

AI would have been utterly useless. We sat in a lecture hall for three hours, staring at exam packets filled with equations and formulas and chemical reactions and had to solve them with nothing but the Holy Spirit and a pencil.

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I understand that my experience was not the universal one. But we can start by observing that, generally speaking, there are two branches of study: Real subjects STEM and fake subjects liberal arts.¹

AI poses some challenges to STEM education, especially in computer science, where it can be used to write code. But in the main, kids can’t use ChatGPT to get around differential equations or fluid dynamics, because at the end of the day you have to sit in a room with a pencil and solve equations. You can either do that, or you can’t.

But liberal arts studies? That’s the nightmare. Legitimately, I cannot think of a way to stop AI from completely disrupting liberal arts education.

And yet, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing? In fact, I’m kind of on the side of the cheaters? I’m Ron Burgundy?

Let’s talk about it...