Our world is in an academic crisis, where the cultural norms have completely switched. With the increased use of AI, it is becoming a common practice for everyone to cheat and feel little to no remorse.
Do your work as if Jesus or your parents were watching you do it.
It is time to bring our biblical perspectives back and stop conforming to worldly norms.
Cheating is lying. When you turn in an assignment you cheated on, you are telling your professor you did the work, when you did not do anything. This does not seem ethical or in line with what Jesus would do.
Proverbs 10:9 NLT says, “People with integrity walk safely, but those who follow crooked paths will be exposed.”
Not only are you lying, but you are also putting yourself at risk when you cheat, even if you think your professor will not catch you. You might think nobody saw you, but God saw you.
There is a reason students are taught not to cheat from an early age: Cheating once opens the door to doing it again. If you use AI to write a paper, it is possible you would have no problem using AI to create an entire project or term paper.
When you cheat, you are also selling yourself short academically and cognitively. Cheating may be a result of stress, lack of time or simple indifference toward that one 8 a.m. class.
Be confident in your abilities; you made it into college because you had good grades in high school. More importantly, you were accepted into Taylor University because you were a person of faith.
Do the work yourself; you have the knowledge to do it. God gave you a mind to think and use for His Kingdom, not to use for sinful purposes.
It is easy to gloss over the sin because everyone does it, but it does not make your actions appropriate.
Scott Gaier, director of the Academic Enrichment Center, highlighted seeing the issue from a Christian worldview.
“If you, especially a Christian worldview, if you see it as sin, it’s more convicting to not do it,” Gaier said. “But one of the concerns I have, especially with A.I., in especially not doing your work, and you can see this in neuroscience: you are actually harming your ability to think.”
He added that cheating is disobedience to God — it is sin.
Kelli Cummings, director of Taylor’s writing center, said when a student is in the moment, they do not know what their class can actually teach them.
“I think it’s easy to sit there and go like, ‘This isn’t relevant to me. This isn’t useful. I’m never going to actually need this, so it doesn’t really matter, right? This isn’t like specified to my degree,’” Cummings said. “But at the end of the day, if we’re thinking of education as like this transformational process, then you actually don’t know what’s going to transform you until after you’ve been transformed, right?”
Taylor, let’s make our academic work pure and admirable to the Lord. Let’s do our best on every assignment and put forth our best effort, even if we think the assignment is pointless and a waste of time. We are called to glorify the Lord in everything we do, including academics.
Every class at Taylor has a purpose in mind and so do the weekly assignments.
