hat’s the point of a college education when AI is doing the thinking for us?

That’s the question plaguing many university faculty as AI makes student cheating easier than ever. In a survey published this week by Elon University, 95% of more than 1,000 faculty surveyed reported concerns about students’ overreliance on AI technology.

The report found that educators are worried about declining student performance and academic integrity as a result of the technology:

• 90% said that AI would diminish students’ critical thinking skills, while 83% reported that the use of generative AI would shrink attention spans.
• 78%, meanwhile, said cheating on their campus has increased since the tools became broadly available, with 73% reporting personally dealing with academic integrity issues. 48% reported a decline in the quality of student research.
• Nearly three-quarters of the educators surveyed felt that generative AI would diminish the value of degrees entirely.

This isn’t the first time the flag has been raised about AI’s impact on how we think: One study from MIT found that when given SAT test questions, subjects who used ChatGPT showed low brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.”

Despite the generally negative perception of the tech, these faculty members still felt that teaching students how to use AI effectively was vital. But as it stands, that work hasn’t been done: 63% of faculty reported that their 2025 spring graduates were not prepared to use generative AI in their workplaces, while 69% said they address “AI literacy topics” like bias, hallucination and privacy in their curriculum.