How to Cheat in College with AI: An Anthropological Study

Catalog description

This course uses the provocative framing of "cheating" as an entry point for learning about ethnographic methods for students with no background in anthropology. Artificial intelligence has placed undergraduates in a profound bind: academic policy warns that using AI on coursework may constitute cheating and be grounds for discipline, while the broader message from career services, industry, and peers is that fluency in AI tools is fast becoming a prerequisite for professional survival. Students live this contradiction daily, often without a shared vocabulary for the moral, emotional, and practical negotiations it demands. Rather than debate AI's impact, this course trains students to study ethnographically how their own community is navigating it at Stanford. Supported by short readings on ethnographic method, students will gain hands-on practice conducting a small ethnographic project among their peers. They will investigate amongst peers how undergrads deploy, rationalize, conceal, disclose, or resist AI use; how they weigh risk against advantage; and how notions of integrity, competence, and fairness get reshaped under pressure. By the end of the course, students will have produced original fieldnotes and a short ethnographic write-up, and will have gained transferable skills in observation, interviewing, and qualitative analysis - alongside a clearer, evidence-based picture of how their own generation is living in unprecedented times.