The Second Crisis in Schools

Vicki Davis (00:00): If you use AI to write student feedback and they think it came from you, who’s being dishonest? Today on Thought Leader Thursday, we’re discussing the honesty crisis.

Announcer (00:12): This is the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:16): Today we’re talking with Dr. Christian Miller, the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. For over a decade, he’s led some of the largest research projects on honesty and moral character ever funded, including The Honesty Project and The Character Project. His new book is called The Honesty Crisis, and it will be out May 19th, 2026.

We’re going to talk about something that every teacher and administrator and every college professor is feeling right now: what honesty means in the age of AI, and how it’s under threat in our classrooms from both sides of the desk. So, Christian, thanks for coming on the show.

Editor’s note: this conversation was recorded April 15, 2026. The Honesty Crisis was released by Oxford University Press on May 19, 2026, and is available now.

Christian Miller (00:58): Great to be with you. I really look forward to our conversation.

Vicki Davis (01:01): What do we do about honesty, and where has it gone, especially in the age of AI? And some people just say, oh, it’s always been this bad. As a teacher who’s been teaching 24 years, I’m not convinced. What do you think?

Christian Miller (01:12): On the historical question, I’m not convinced either. I mean, student cheating has been around forever. That’s nothing new. That’s nothing we haven’t heard before. I did think, though, that it ramped up when we shipped it to the Internet. So when the Internet came along, that was first what I call an honesty crisis, where honesty becomes more appealing and dishonesty is hard to detect. So it’s easier to get away with dishonesty. When you had the Internet, that was, I think, the first big moment.

Editor’s note: “where honesty becomes more appealing” is left exactly as spoken because both independent transcriptions of this audio produce the same words. From context, Dr. Miller appears to mean DIShonesty becoming more appealing. Unresolved — flagged for review before this line is quoted.

You could go online, you could find material, you could put that material into your paper or find answers to problem sets and really cut corners that way. But that didn’t end there, of course. And so with the dawn of AI, I think that’s now the second honesty crisis we’re facing in education. Progression of more and more opportunity to cheat, as well as difficulty in being caught cheating.

That’s a bad combination. When it’s easier to cheat and it’s more difficult to get caught cheating, recipe for dishonesty.

Vicki Davis (02:04): So what does your research say about honesty and this topic? I mean, do people want to be honest? Is it as rampant as we think it is, according to the research?

Christian Miller (02:13): In general, I think people do want to be honest, but there are limits. It only goes so far. So the research I’ve consulted suggests that, in general, we believe that things like cheating are wrong. We also care about how we’re perceived by others. We want to be perceived by others as honest people. We even want to think of ourselves as honest people. So those are all good things. Those are going to keep dishonesty in check.

At the same time, we do have a desire to cheat if we think we can get away with it, and it’ll benefit ourselves. Our character, I think, here is complicated. It’s multifaceted. It’s not like simplistic. We’re good, we’re bad. We’re honest, we’re dishonest. I think we’re a mixed bag. As the opportunity to cheat gets easier and the rewards get greater, the good side of our character can erode. So that belief that cheating is wrong will have limits. That desire to think of ourselves as good people or not as people, that has limits.

So what is happening with the AI situation is, before there was always this threat, maybe I’ll get caught. There was this idea, well, it’s still going to take me some work to go on the Internet, and I’m going to have to find this stuff, and I’m going to have to change it and adapt it for my purposes. Now it’s so easy that a lot of the traditional safeguards aren’t as effective as they once were. So all I have to do is go to this website, give the prompt, and I can get, in a span of five seconds or 10 seconds, my assignment completed for me. I can get a quality work done for me in 10 seconds, whereas normally that would take me an hour or two. That’s a really hard temptation to resist. Once you know it’s there, it’s available to you, it’s a really hard temptation to resist.

Vicki Davis (03:57): So you’ve also said something that’s caught my attention — that in education, the dishonesty problem isn’t only about students, but it’s also about teachers using AI to give feedback. Now, I will admit that I use AI to support me. So I’ll put in my rubric and I’ll grade, and I’ll go in AI and I’ll say, hey, this is the points they have off, you know, write this up so that I can paste it in. And I’m kind of, I guess, using it like a word calculator.

But what’s your perspective on AI to give feedback? Is it having AI, quote, grade — something I personally think we should never have teachers do? Or what’s your take on that side of the desk?

Christian Miller (04:36): Yeah, I think it’s so easy to jump into the student side of it and just focus on that. But I think there’s lots of other aspects to this whole AI discussion. I mean, we could even have a discussion of whether AI itself is honest or not.

There’s a question of what about in the teacher’s research, if they’re doing research or just newsletter, publication, communication with parents, all that kind of side of thing if they’re using AI.

But here you’re focusing specifically on teachers grading or teachers assessing student work. I think it’s all a question of whether there’s transparency or not. So let’s start with the student case, but then go where you took us, to the teacher case. I have no problem from an honesty perspective if a student is transparent that they used AI, because now we’re out of the — there may be other problems. Maybe they weren’t supposed to, maybe they’re violating the rules, but from an honesty perspective, at least they’re forthcoming, they’re transparent about what they did.

If they don’t do that, if they present their work as if it were their own with no disclosure when it wasn’t, then that actually meets the definition of plagiarism. So they’re using another source to produce the work and they’re taking credit for that work themselves. That’s just a kind of standard example of plagiarism. Whether that’s plagiarism from the internet, whether that’s plagiarism from another student’s paper, whether that’s plagiarism from AI, it still counts as plagiarism and plagiarism is dishonest.

Now we shift to the teacher case. If the teacher says, look, I’m going to assess your work using the help of these tools. Some of my communication with you is going to be generated by AI to help save some time of writing these emails or whatnot — might be other ethical questions that arise, but there’s no, in my mind, question about honesty.

Here’s where I think it gets quite tricky. So the student gets the paper back. On the paper are some typed comments, or somewhere there’s this feedback. The feedback is AI generated. The student isn’t told that. It looks like it’s coming from the teacher. That’s what any reasonable person would have assumed is not.

They’re actually being dishonest towards the student. If that were to be discovered, that would be a violation of trust, and I think erode the trust in the classroom, which is very important to have.

Vicki Davis (06:50): Our policy at our school is that some AI feedback tools are allowed, but with complete oversight with a teacher, complete transparency to your students. So if I have a massive project and I have AI, quote, looking at it or whatever and supporting me as it’s a huge project, I always say, okay, students, I’ve reviewed this. This is the grade that I’ve given you. But I did use AI in portions of assessing this for you. So if you have any questions or issues, I want you to look this over and bring it back to me. Is that how we should handle it? Or should we just not even use it at all?

Christian Miller (07:28): Well, as far as an honesty perspective, I have no objections at all. You’re being very transparent. You’re being very clear.

There’s a larger question of role modeling beyond honesty. You know, how should we think about a good person? How should we become better? And one really important idea is role modeling good character in front of other people, if you want to try and inspire them to be good themselves.

So the point here is, transparency is great, no problem with honesty. Now, if you’re saying that to the students, they’re going to naturally have the thoughts, well, if you’re using that, why can’t I?

Vicki Davis (08:04): And of course, in my classroom, they can, but yeah.

Christian Miller (08:07): Yeah, but many of them wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be allowed. So if it’s perceived as in any way a double standard or hypocritical, like you’re not letting us use it, but you’re using it, why not let us use it too? That’s going to create problems.

So instead, if the idea is I’m going to role model — look, I know these tools are available, I’m not going to use them. I’m going to instead pour myself into grading this paper using my own knowledge and experience and skills, and it might be not as reliable. So I want you to come to me if I made a mistake or whatnot, but at least you know that this is entirely me speaking and I’m not drawing on anything else. That’s another idea. I’m not saying it’s better or worse. I’m reticent to tell someone who’s working tremendous hours in K through 12 that they’re doing something wrong.

Vicki Davis (08:53): So when we have a student bring something to us, I mean, all of us teachers have a different way of, quote, handling the situation.

Say my friend Dawn across the hall — a student brings her paper that is obviously most likely AI written. And we know AI detectors don’t work, which is a big part of the problem. Is there any research on the best way to handle that possible dishonesty issue?

Christian Miller (09:18): I have a couple of things to say here that are going to be controversial, and I’ll just flag that. And, you know, listeners, please feel free to take it for what it’s worth.

On the detector front, I would have agreed with you maybe even a year ago or two years ago. And I know you’ve had past guests talk about this too. Recently there seems to be a bit of a change, a pivot. So I’m seeing places like Pangram, which are reporting stunning reliability and detection. So almost no false positives. So one in 10,000 kind of rates of error with false positives. So I am revising my thinking a bit about whether to go to these detectors or not.

Even if that’s true — let’s just assume that there is this great detector out there now — still, I think we want to have some valid concerns about using it. One is it’s not 100% reliable. Even if it’s 99.99% reliable, it’s not 100%. So there’s questions of whether it’s going to meet the threshold for punishment of the students, especially in my case at a university. We have an actual committee where you would have to go through kind of trial process. And so would we meet the evidentiary bar there? I mean, and there’s also larger questions about trust and, you know, if this is something that’s known to students, they’re going to have to run their papers through that. What kind of classroom environment does it create? Does it break down trust in the classroom and create an atmosphere of fear? Those are all valid points and concerns.

So, having said that, I’m of two minds. One part of my mind says, okay, this person has brought this paper to me, has brought a paper to me that they’re suspicious about. One part of my mind says, let’s use these detectors and see what they tell us. Part of my mind says, let’s enter a conversation with a student. So if it’s my student, I would have a student come in. If the professor came to me, I recommend to the professor enter in a conversation with that student, to try and do it in as least confrontational a way as possible, to try and extract that truth from the students about what they did, rather than making it adversarial from the very beginning.

I’ll say, look, you know, a student comes into my office — bit about this paper. How did you write it? Walk me through the steps. Can you explain this idea? This wasn’t something in the class material. Where did this come from? How did you learn about this? At some point, often they will say, I admit I used some other source.

Editor’s note: both transcriptions garble a few words at the start of this exchange (one renders it “read about this paper,” the other “bit about this paper”). The likely phrasing is “tell me a bit about this paper,” but the audio is not clear enough to state that, so the fragment is left as transcribed.

If they do that, then I tend to be quite lenient. I will not take them to any kind of hearing. I’m not going to get other people involved. I’ll say something along the lines of, look, there has to be some kind of consequence for this, but I’m not going to fail you for the class. I’m not going to sack you for the entire grade. Your grade will take a hit, but let’s learn from this, rewrite the paper, and give you a second chance.

Vicki Davis (12:00): They were honest. So in the detection, you know, my students are pretty open and honest. We’ve had conversations about humanizers, right? Students will, whatever AI tool of their choices, generate or use it. And then they’ll pull it into a, quote, humanizer, which supposedly makes it undetectable. And then they’ll run it through whatever AI detection tool they know people they’re using, until they get a paper.

So while a detection service may have false positives, I guess my question is always what you can’t test, which is the false negatives, right? Like, that’s the big unknown here, because all it takes is one or two getting away with it, telling all their peers they’re getting away with it, to discredit any AI detection tool we could try to use.

We want to make this easy. It just doesn’t feel like an easy solution. And it is a crisis. I agree.

Christian Miller (12:53): If you want the magic solution, I’m not going to have it. Also say, confess, I struggle the most about this. And I don’t have an answer. And this is what keeps me up at night, is when we get to more advanced classes. And this would apply, I think, in middle school and high school, not just in college. Intro classes are one thing. More advanced classes are another.

In my case, I’m a philosopher, teach majors-level philosophy classes. How can I not have papers, which I want my students to reflect on the topic, do a lot of thinking, construct an argument, raise objections, respond to the objections, do all that kind of work, which you can’t really cram into 50 minutes of class? How can I take that away from them and still think that I’m doing a good job teaching them and giving them the skills that they need as philosophy majors or proficient students in English or history? I don’t have an answer to that, and that keeps me up at night.

Vicki Davis (13:46): We have to be honest with ourselves about the state that AI has put us in with education. Because if we can’t discuss these honestly and say, hey, I’m not buying the line of the tech companies that AI is going to fix everything — AI has broken a lot of things.

And a lot of us K-12 have moved to oral conversations. My AP class, they have to be able to defend every line of code verbally, on the spot. But then part of my struggle with the handwritten papers — we’re doing that too — is that when you have a student who is dysgraphic and dyslexic, as I do in my own family, and struggles with written expression, those students literally and legally need technology to be able to help them to truly express themselves in the world.

And then there’s the piece of entry-level jobs are going away in lieu of jobs where people can manage AI. They have to be able to manage AI agents is where we’re heading, and know how to do that type of work. So we really are in a conundrum, aren’t we?

Christian Miller (14:59): We are. So I have a similar situation in my family, so I’m very cognizant of that.

You could make the quick point, but it’s not completely satisfactory, that there’s one thing of, and it’s a different thing of using a computer with internet access. We have ways of shutting off or blocking internet access, so at least they have the typing tools and the spell check and whatnot without the option of going somewhere else for help. But that’s not a completely satisfactory point.

I agree with you also on — well, at my level of college here, doing a disservice if we’re not providing an opportunity to the students to make use of these tools, because then they’ll be at a disadvantage when they get out in the job world. I don’t know about that. I mean, I think they have plenty of opportunity to use this on their own, and they’re using it all the time anyway.

And at least in my world of the humanities, I don’t see — I mean, maybe it really varies by field. So maybe I should qualify what I say. My business students would be different or my science students would be different. Maybe I have to go field by field. I’m not so sure that my humanities students are at a disadvantage if I say, look, I don’t want you to use this stuff for my philosophy papers. I think they’re going to have plenty of opportunity to use it for other things. Maybe I’m here being naively optimistic, but I don’t want to think that I’m disadvantaging them by discouraging them from using it.

Vicki Davis (16:18): So, Christian, what is your goal for the book, The Honesty Crisis?

Christian Miller (16:22): The book is larger in scope than just education. So it’s talking about six different areas of society where I see honesty crisis happening, and education is only one of them. Others include things like deepfake videos, political misinformation, celebrity, even religion. I talk about things like sermon plagiarism. So I’m worried about honesty crisis popping up all over the place.

I guess my goals would be threefold. One, just appreciate what honesty is in the first place. Get a better handle on what it is to be an honest person. That’s actually quite interesting and more nuanced and complex than you might have thought. It’s not just a matter of don’t tell lies. It has way more richness to it than that.

So greater appreciation of what honesty is. Greater appreciation of where it’s eroding in society, places we might not even have paid attention to. AI in the education case is an obvious one. Some are more subtle.

Lastly, a kind of feeling and a motivation to do something about it. Not only now I’m better equipped and more knowledgeable about this, but I’m also inspired to change my life and work towards change in other people’s lives to address these honesty crises. There are things we can do concretely. It’s really important that we do them, because honesty is our most treasured virtue. It erodes. Terrible things tend to happen in society. So it’s worth fighting for.

Vicki Davis (17:41): Honesty is worth fighting for. As an educator, I want to believe in the integrity of what’s happening in my classroom. I mean, we don’t want to give our lives for something that’s pretend, that’s fake, that’s not real. And we know that people struggle with, you know, what do I believe in in the world anymore?

You know, more than ever, kids do need to see teachers who do have honesty and integrity and understanding — all of us are flawed, of course. But as I say to my kids, when you mess up, fess up.

So we’ve been talking with Dr. Christian Miller. The book is The Honesty Crisis. It’s one I’m looking forward to, and I think that we all should be discussing. As I always say, we don’t play king of the hill, we make a bigger hill. There’s a lot of room for conversation, and these are the things that we need to be talking about in our staff meetings, at the lunch table, as we move forward and work to make the world a better place. So thank you, Dr. Miller, for being part of that conversation.

Announcer (18:40): Thank you for tuning in to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Join us here every weekday and subscribe to the Classroom Matters newsletter. See you later, educator.