Cornell Hopes to Turn Cheating Into Teachable Moment

Starting this week, Cornell University students caught committing minor academic integrity violations will have the opportunity to avoid formal sanctions—and ideally learn from their transgressions.

The Accepting Responsibility program, which is now a part of the university’s official academic integrity code, offers students an alternative to the primary hearing and appeals process and won’t result in a finding of guilt.

Rather, it’s “akin to a warning,” the policy says. Students who choose to go through the program—they or the faculty member accusing them can opt to pursue the hearing and appeals process—receive a limited penalty decided by their professor and waive their right to appeal. They’re also required to attend an in-person workshop to discuss the implications of their actions and complete related assignments within two weeks.

“We have them write in their own words what happened. Sometimes it’s just, ‘I got caught using AI,’ but other times, it’s pages of writing that’s clearly cathartic for them,” Elizabeth Karns, director of academic integrity initiatives, told Inside Higher Ed. “We also ask them who they want to be when they leave Cornell. What values do they want? What habits do they want to create now to support those values? And then, who will they turn to in a crisis when they’re dealing with these kinds of questions?” she said. “The goal here is to get them thinking about their future life, not just about academic integrity. This is about life.”

The campuswide launch of the program, which has been running as a limited pilot since 2024, comes as colleges and universities across the country grapple with how to uphold academic integrity in the age of artificial intelligence. Although some college students have always cheated on assignments and exams, the sophistication and widespread availability of large language models has made cheating easier and more prevalent.

According to a recent survey from the American Association of Colleges and Universities, 73 percent of faculty say they have personally dealt with academic integrity issues involving AI. About half of the students who participated in Cornell’s Accepting Responsibility pilot used AI in violation of academic integrity standards, according to Karns, who said that stress, anxiety and poor time management remain the primary motives for student cheaters.

“The thing I hear most often is about AI dependency. Students say they don’t know how to do assignments without it,” she said. “But they can so quickly get the answer through AI that the foundational skills we’re teaching them don’t get used or developed. We talk to them about how they need to develop math, language or other skills by actually doing them. You can’t outsource that stuff. That’s a pretty profound moment for many of them.”

Fixing a Broken System

Cornell’s initiative may be especially relevant for this moment, but faculty and administrators conceived of the program before the AI boom.

“We knew our system was broken. Fundamentally, things needed to change,” Lisa Nishii, senior vice provost for enrollment management and undergraduate education, told Inside Higher Ed. “Faculty might suspect that a student has cheated in some way, but I have heard some say things like, ‘Well, maybe they didn’t know better’ or ‘I don’t want to ruin their record forever’ or ‘Maybe it wasn’t their first time.’”

To avoid a time-consuming hearing and appeals process that could seriously damage a student’s academic career, Nishii said, many faculty choose to have an informal conversation with them in hopes that they learn from their mistakes.

“But if that’s how a lot of faculty are handling it, we’re eroding our culture of academic integrity because we’re not doing it in a systematic way,” Nishii said. “Faculty don’t know if a student has received a warning before—this could be a student’s fifth warning, for all they know—and should really be going through a much more formal process. Meanwhile, students are getting the message that it doesn’t really matter and they can get away with it.”

The Accepting Responsibility program has formalized academic integrity warnings. And results from the two-year pilot suggest that students are learning from their mistakes.

According to university data, roughly 360 students across 100 courses participated in the pilot. Of those, only four students have had a second violation. (Students can only enter the program once, and must go through the hearing and appeals process upon a second violation.) It’s also been a welcome innovation for faculty, who don’t get bogged down in the formal hearing and appeals process.

“The traditional process feels more adversarial. It’s me bringing forward an accusation against a student and it plays out like a mini trial,” Matthew Eichhorn, an assistant teaching professor of computer science who participated in the pilot, told Inside Higher Ed. “But with this new program I stay on the same side as the student. It gives an avenue for learning and growing from the process.”

Cornell isn’t the only higher education institution taking a restorative justice approach to academic integrity violations. The University of Rochester and the University of California campuses in San Diego and Santa Cruz are among the institutions that have launched similar programs allowing students to reflect on ethical decision-making.

“Turning cheating into a teachable moment is a valuable, fair move for higher education institutions,” said Greer Murphy, vice president for strategy at the International Center for Academic Integrity and director of UC Santa Cruz’s academic integrity office. And as AI threatens college’s value proposition, finding effective ways to turn students off to cheating may be more important than ever, they added.

“It’s always been challenging to live up to and uphold our values, for students, faculty and humans in general. AI didn’t change that, but it did increase temptation and opportunity,” Murphy said. “Institutions need to take a hard look at the ways we’re doing the work we’ve always done—whether that’s guiding learning or certifying it—and consider what changes we need to make.”