I have been attending UCO on and off since 2020 and am finally in my last semester. I am a professional media major in the Department of Mass Communication, and before I officially graduate, I have a few takes I’d like to get off my chest. After seeing all the hullabaloo over AI use in higher education, my first is that AI is a massive issue for college, but not for the reasons people might think.
The issue is not cheating. Cheating and shortcuts have always existed. In high school, I knew someone who printed the answers to exams on tiny pieces of paper that could fit into a shirt sleeve and sold themfor$5each.Now,with the internet in everyone’s pocket, it’s become even more common.
If caught cheating, students face at least an F and, in the worst-case scenario, expulsion. You either have tobeextremelyconfidentor extremely desperate, and there is something human about that choice, whether we like it or not.
The real issue with AI is that colleges have no ground to stand on when it comes to policing misuse. For decades, colleges have weakened their standards so much through retention pressure and completionbased grading that the idea of trying to police students’ AI use is almost laughable.
Last month, Reuters reported that Harvard faculty voted to capAgrades after a reportshowedA’srosefrom 24percentofgradesin2005 to 60 percent in 2025. Now imagine what the situation is like for universities fighting far harder than Harvard for retention and enrollment. Standardized tests, once one of the few outside checks on a student’s academic ability, have been shortened, simplified or made optional. The SAT got rid of its essay. The digital SAT is shorter and gives students more time per question. Science and writing are now optional parts of theACT and do not affect the composite score.
At the same time, test-optional admissions policies have exploded. FairTest, an advocacy group, says more than 80 percent of U.S. four-year colleges did not require ACT or SAT scores for fall 2025 admissions. And grade inflation is not limited to college. ACT found the average high school GPA rose from 3.17 in 2010 to 3.36 in 2021 while the average ACT composite score fell, indicating that colleges are leaning harder on GPAs as those GPAs have become less reliable.
Each change can be defended on its own. Not every student tests well. Not every student has the same resources.
But when all of those changes stack on top of each other, the message from the top down is that college has reduced itself to little more than a hefty price tag for a fancy piece of paper rather than a place that sincerely cares about academic integrity or producing qualified professionals.
Plenty of students still care. The students who want to be writers, nurses, teachers, engineers, accountants or journalists still know they have to be competent in their fields.AI can help them, but relying on it too heavily will cost them later.
The problem is that colleges have built a system where apathy can survive. At this point, students too often just show up and receive A’s, and in some of my UCO classes, they barely even had to do that. AI just makes it easier to take advantage of standards that were already barely enforced.
So when colleges ask why students are using AI to avoid doing the work, they should start by looking at the academic culture they helped create. If a degree is still supposed to mean something, colleges shouldn’t have treated standards as optional until a new technology scared them into actually enforcing them.