Fundamentally, most educators would say that cheating students are only hurting themselves. If they invested in the class, but didn't learn or achieve goals in it, then someday that will boomerang on them.<p>Conversely, institutions which award grades, certificates and degrees must protect their brands and good names. If cheating students have the same credentials as honest ones, those credentials are devalued!<p>But let's go deeper and consider incentives. It's a sickness among students, if they are so driven, so determined to achieve high marks at any cost. The ones who are willing to use LLMs and cheat are hurting the innocent ones, as we see here, because now educators have a hair-trigger, and these false-positive tools are hurting EVERYONE. It's sad and dismaying that education is some sort of adversarial, low-trust, dog-eat-dog world.<p>I went back to college to earn certifications and just prove, "hey, I know this stuff, I'm current, here's my seal of approval." Maximal effort really wasn't necessary to pass or graduate, yet I went into full overachiever mode. Sad to say, in my calculus course, I feared incompetence, which led me to leverage every advantage and exploit the grading methods to get that "A"; yet I forgot almost everything as soon as I put my pencil down in the final exam. I succeeded alright, but I didn't really learn, but I didn't cheat either.<p>So let's question what motivates students to cheat, and why it's become so widespread to the detriment of ethics and codes of honor. Let's question why teachers need to be on high alert for cheaters, so much that they're embarking on AI-witch-hunts now. Is it public education? Is it high costs, tuitions and debts? Is it a ferocious job market? Immigrants and globalization? All of the above, yeah?<p>Just another reason that I support home-schoolers, and school choice, because perhaps more segregated and tailored environments are more conducive to high-trust, ethical graduates.