The growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and paid tutors is raising concerns about academic integrity among students at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM). Technologies such as ChatGPT and CoPilot have made it easier for students to cheat by completing assignments with little effort, while a trend of paying tutors to do coursework for them is also on the rise.
One example is the Snapchat account “Tutor Grace,” which circulates in the USM community, offering to complete a wide range of assignments, including essays, discussions, exams, quizzes, and even dissertations. Though Tutor Grace is publicly advertised, other options for paid assignment completion may exist but remain less visible.
This trend prompts the question: Why are students resorting to unethical methods to complete their degrees?
“Well, some people are just innately going to cheat,” said Nolan Perry, a first-year biology science student. “Some people are just like that, and, you know, deep down inside of them, they’ll cheat in any opportunity that’s given to them to give themselves an advantage or to make their lives easier. Then there are people that will—and I’ve found this especially in my biology degree—a lot of people will consider certain classes like fallback classes, so they’ll cheat really hard in those classes to give themselves, like, grace. There’s some people that would cheat out of, like, necessity.”
Jason McCormick, interim director of The Writing Center and visiting faculty member in the English department, highlighted the pressures that may lead students to cheat.
“I think that students often cheat because there is a huge amount of pressure on students,” McCormick said. “I think that most students don’t go into classes planning on cheating. I think that the majority of students that I’ve had who do some sort of academic dishonesty do so because they find themselves in a position of being overworked, overtaxed, and not knowing how to deal with that pressure and feeling like they have no other options.”
The long-term consequences of cheating, McCormick warned, go beyond academic dishonesty and can hinder students’ personal development.
“I think it’s a disservice to the students themselves,” McCormick said. “The type of English that I teach is about developing skills and developing the ability to express yourself in your own ideas in different sorts of environments. And so, if you can get an easy A and fool the teachers, you lose out on the knowledge that you’re building and the reason you’re going to college.”
A study by ProctorEdu from 2002 to 2015 found that 75-98% of surveyed students admitted to some form of cheating or academic dishonesty. Research by the ETS and the Ad Council found that 90% of students are confident they will not be caught cheating, suggesting a widespread issue of academic dishonesty among current and future generations.
USM offers several academic support services to help students manage challenging coursework, including counseling services and tutoring through academic centers such as the Writing Center, Trio, and the Speaking Center.
“It’s never about just one class,” McCormick said. “It’s about how you’re approaching school. It’s about how you’re managing your workload, both the work that you’re doing for school and the work that you’re doing to survive. And there are ways of doing it that can be helpful.”
