Colleges Are Getting Stricter About Integrity Policies…What Does That Mean for You?
In case you haven’t already heard, Princeton recently ended a 133-year tradition of unproctored exams. For more than a century, students were trusted to take exams without formal supervision in many cases, but starting in Fall 2026, all campus exams will now be proctored. This decision was made by the faculty and was passed almost unanimously, in response to reports from the Daily Princetonian that 30% of Princeton students had cheated on an exam, and with “AI and personal electronic devices” at the core of the decision.
As you might expect, this shift in approach to campus academic integrity isn’t isolated to Princeton. Across the country, Stanford is also instituting in-person proctoring this fall after a multi-year review, and at the K-12 level, school boards are also rushing to keep policies up to date with rapid shifts in technology.
Why do these changes matter? At all levels, faculty and students are grappling with what academic integrity and independent, critical thought means in an academic environment where AI tools are now widely available, and can produce answers instantly in ways that are increasingly difficult to separate from a student’s own work.
What the past four years since the public release of ChatGPT have shown is that generative AI technologies evolve faster than college policies can, and students and their instructors get caught trying to figure out how to approach this new learning environment a semester at a time.
While it can be easy to feel overwhelmed and uncertain about when and how to use AI in a time where these technologies seem ubiquitous, the direction that colleges are heading makes it clear that many top institutions are focused on preserving their time-tested traditions related to the process of knowledge acquisition.
Here’s a few of our thoughts on what these changes actually signal about how high school students should think about preparing for college-level work.
Top Colleges Want to See That Students Can Come to Their Own Conclusions
While it’s easy to want to bypass the frustration of analyzing a 200-page philosophical text, it’s more important than ever to professors to see that students have the capacity to understand, digest, and interpret challenging material. That means that if you’re a high school student applying to top schools, you need to remember that these prestigious institutions aren’t just places to bide time on the way to a career in finance or before medical school. You need to demonstrate that you’re able to read, write, and think at a high level on your own.
Don’t believe us? Just look at the mission statements of a few universities with liberal arts based curricula:
Yale's core mission is to “create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching"
Cornell’s mission is to “discover, preserve and disseminate knowledge, to educate the next generation of global citizens, and to promote a culture of broad inquiry throughout and beyond the Cornell community.”
Vanderbilt University’s core purpose is to “create, preserve, and disseminate knowledge through teaching, research, and the arts. In a culture of inquiry and debate, we create a community driven by radical collaboration and unwavering commitment to academic, professional, and personal growth.”
It’s not a coincidence that the key phrases in these statements blend together. Creating knowledge is at the core of the college experience, and while generative AI can be a helpful tool for synthesis, more and more professors are building in benchmarks to their classes to ensure that students are taking the time to craft their own ideas.
From in-class handwritten assignments to one-on-one conferences to develop your papers, expect professors to raise the bar to ensure that the learning you produce is your own. That means it’s crucial to not take shortcuts at the high school level, especially when it comes to comprehension of complicated texts and idea generation. The time you spend wrestling with hard concepts will be worth it in the end.
Don’t Fear Uncertainty: Embrace It
Whether it’s not knowing how to craft the perfect thesis or feeling confused about the best angle for a scientific paper proposal, uncertainty is part of the process of learning, and always has been. But in the age of AI, it’s easier than ever to bypass the feeling of discomfort that not knowing how to do something immediately can create.
It might be tempting to throw a prompt into ChatGPT ‘just to see what it comes up with,’ but studies show that you’re missing out on the most crucial parts of the learning process when you consistently outsource brainstorming, ideating, and thinking to external software. One of the most common reasons that students end up relying on tech is time. It’s not easy to carve out enough time to brainstorm, but remind yourself that just a few minutes of research, quiet thinking, and reflecting on what you’ve already learned can make a major difference.
The Best College Essays Aren’t Going to Come from AI…
And yes, that’s true no matter how ‘bad of a writer’ you think you are. The truth is that AI can only respond to what you offer it, and when you try to use prompts to get you started, you’re likely to land in the exact same territory as thousands of other hopefuls from around the country. Generative AI works by predicting the most likely “right” next answer, and the same feedback it’s giving you is the same feedback it’ll give students just like you, no matter how many times you type “unique” “distinct” or “creative” in your replies.
Keep in mind that college essays already tend to blend together because admissions officers are often reading dozens each day. That means that it’s never been a better time to take creative risks using your own mind and experience to come up with ideas that AI would never think to tie together. One of my favorite essays from a student came from something very ordinary — a reflection on the patience it took to deseed a pomegranate. The juice running underneath her fingernails, the hundreds of tiny seeds, the perspective it gave her on effort in the modern era of pre-seeded fruit, all combined in a way that worked to reveal her character and unique mindset.
At the end of the day, while generative AI has a seemingly infinite trove of language, it cannot experience the world in the way you can. So lean into the minutiae of your lived experience if you want your application to jump off the page. Admissions officers can tell the difference between essays that come out of genuine observation of the world and ones that come from trying to force a theme or idea into fruition.
So What’s Next?
It’s highly likely that more and more colleges will follow suit and develop policies to insulate certain parts of the learning process from AI while professors learn how and when to incorporate it into the learning process. If you’re truly interested in the life of the mind that liberal-arts curriculum-based universities promise, that shouldn’t scare you. You don’t go to a top-20 school to coast through. These colleges are built around the expectation that their students can take big ideas, sit with them, work through them, and develop an understanding that goes beyond what was originally in front of them.
The earlier you learn to sit in that uncertainty and work through it yourself, the less that transition to college will feel like a jump into a completely different set of expectations. So the next time you are sitting with act II of Macbeth and you feel the instinct to throw your notes into ChatGPT and move on, just pause and remember that the point isn’t just to get the work done, but to create new internal connections.
Take a deep breath. Stick with it, and trust that you’ll find your way through.
