Denise Pope is co-founder of Challenge Success and senior lecturer, Stanford Graduate School of Education. Drew Schrader is a school design partner at Challenge Success.This article appeared in The Hechinger Report, February 14, 2023

Recently, there’s been a virtual tsunami of stories about artificial intelligence and its impact on education. A primary concern is how easy programs like ChatGPT make it for students to cheat. Educators are scrambling to rethink assignments, and families are struggling with another addition to the ever-growing list of online tools that cause concern.

Yet, the conversations we have heard so far are really missing the point. Instead of asking “How can we prevent students from cheating?,” we ought to ask whythey are cheating in the first place.

From our research on hundreds of thousands of middle and high school students over the past decade, we have learned that cheating is often a symptom of…