AI Cheating & Legal Risk in Higher Ed: A Q&A with Christian Moriarty (Part 1)

A Q&A with Christian Moriarty on AI, academic integrity, and best practices for AI policy.

Christian Moriarty is an ethicist and attorney, director and treasurer of the International Center for Academic Integrity, and a professor at St. Petersburg College. He now spends about a week a month helping institutions build AI policy. His answers below are in his own words; the questions have been condensed, and his responses lightly cleaned only for transcription artifacts. The views expressed are Christian Moriarty’s own and do not constitute legal advice or necessarily reflect the views of Proctorio. Christian received no compensation for this interview and nothing said herein constitutes legal advice or is an endorsement of any product, service, or vendor, including Proctorio. This interview is published with Christian Moriarty's permission for use on the Proctorio blog only. It may not be reproduced, excerpted, quoted, or repurposed in any other context without his prior written consent — contact marketing@proctorio.com before reuse.

Hi Christian. Thanks for joining me. I’d like to start by referencing the article you published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “When AI Cheating Becomes a Legal Risk”. That’s an attention-grabber. What prompted you to write the article?

I think right now higher education is facing an existential crisis, in two different ways: that AI might obviate higher education altogether depending on your perspective, but in the other, that higher education is still important, but the way we are teaching and assessing our students is removing ourselves out of the equation. If a student has completely cognitively offloaded their learning onto an artificial intelligence, either partially or completely, they're receiving credentials that they didn't earn. And that credential's value is being devalued as we speak. So it was important to me to help people understand what the ethical and legal obligations are that they might have, and where faculty at the core are able to direct their students' learning while maximizing academic freedom, and also giving the necessary due process that we are obligated to give to students.

In your article you split faculty obligations into two categories, Grading and Academic Discipline. Would you walk us through them?

The question a lot of faculty members are running into is: what are their legal and ethical obligations when it comes to a suspicion of inappropriate artificial intelligence? The good news is that while current law does not perfectly map onto the situation we are in, it's still a pretty good guide on those due-process ethical obligations.

On one side is grading and academic discretion. Typically speaking, American law has granted higher education faculty members really wide leeway on how teachers grade their individual students on academic issues. As long as it's not arbitrary or capricious, and they follow their own rules that they have, the courts will, generally speaking, almost never second-guess what those academicians are doing.

Where the courts tend to get involved is the behavior aspect. If you do a significant enough punishment—which can look like a suspension, a course removal, an expulsion—that starts to land into the behavior zone. That is separate from academic discretion, and it gets a higher level of required due process. That can be a notice, that can be an opportunity to be heard and, depending on how bad it might be, cross-examination or a hearing. But ultimately, even then, courts will not second-guess the decisions about the behaviors. What they second-guess is: do you have a process that follows the minimum requirements by law, and did you actually follow that process? There are notable cases in artificial intelligence law where, no matter which zone you're in, it's pretty much been, ‘we're not deciding whether this student cheated or not. We’re only deciding whether you followed your own process.’

So what do you see as the biggest misstep going on? Are faculty kicking things to the discipline side too quickly, or are schools not following a process once they're there?

All of the above, definitely. And I'd add one more that I think is more common than we realize, and also perhaps more insidious: faculty members thinking that they have discretion over behavior issues are making unilateral decisions and not going through the required process that the institution has. They are failing students—wholesale—without an opportunity to be heard, and without notice or explanation. While no one has any numbers on this, I'm willing to bet that it's higher than we care to admit.

But also, professors didn't get into this business to be AI cops. They have too much else on their plate. For myself, I have 200 students every semester. I find myself—still, to this day—spending more time determining whether they did the assignment appropriately rather than grading for what they actually gave me. And that, as it stands, is an untenable position that we need to get out of.

For the first problem, how can schools help faculty know where that line is?

I think it's as simple as training them on it. I've been traveling the world training folks on AI policy, and I kept assuming: ‘all these people are smart people, they are involved with AI, I don't need to talk about the basics with them.’ But that's not the case. For example, about six months ago, one group was asking things like "Hey, I don't know what an LLM is, can you explain that to me?"

So now I start every single meeting with this: ‘put up your fingers, how comfortable or familiar you are with AI?’ And in a room of PhDs the average I get is two fingers out of five. Then I do a test with them: ‘here's 10 pictures and text, can you identify whether it's AI?’ The average gets five out of 10, as in literally no better than a coin flip. The worst group I ever tried this with got literally zero. The best ever was seven, and that only happened once. So the best room on the planet gets a C. And the average is a failure.

So however it's done, we clearly either aren't training faculty enough, or we're not doing enough to give them the tools or empower them to make these decisions and understand when something should be academic discretion versus behavioral discipline. And the institutions are not providing enough resources or, frankly, wherewithal to even address the issue in order to support those faculty members.

You'd rather schools didn't wait to get sued before they act.

The reason a lot of this is getting buried is that there's just no place for these issues to go. At one of the conferences I went to, a colleague was telling me they were having so many AI issues, and the administration wouldn't put any additional money into it. But then they got sued, which woke up the administration to the fact that, this is a problem. All of a sudden there was a budget and three more employees. I really want us to get to a place where litigation is not what's encouraging us to pay attention to this. There is a cottage industry right now of entire law firms dedicated to defending students that have been accused of artificial intelligence cheating. There is a lot of money being exchanged, and I'd rather us not have to be on the news before we do anything.

So how does a school actually reduce its litigation risk?

My very lawyerly caveat to this is that you're never going to completely avoid litigation. What we're looking at is risk management. Can you reduce the chance of being sued? The way you do that is you have not just a policy, but an understandable policy, and you enforce that policy, and you educate people on that policy, and you have evidence that it's being followed, and you follow it consistently each and every time without fear or favor. With all that, you still may get sued, but it's more likely to get resolved a lot sooner, and more than likely you're not going to have to settle or find yourself on a bench trial defending yourself. The case I talked about in my article was where a private school just didn't follow their own policy, and what little policy they had made it so that the decision maker was also the person that hears appeals. That's not genuine due process.

For whatever reason, private colleges especially are used to being ensconced in the idea that their decision isn't reviewable and that their students don't have any rights. And that is definitely not true. Here's what is: at public schools, students literally have 14th Amendment rights to their education. If you matriculated them, they have a property right to stay, and you have to provide due process to remove them. For private schools, they have a contract: the student handbook is effectively a contract, and if it says you can only remove a student for these reasons, you indeed can only remove them for those reasons.

Moriarty, C. “When AI Cheating Becomes a Legal Risk.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 4, 2026,https://www.chronicle.com/article/when-ai-cheating-becomes-a-legal-risk.

Continued in “AI, the Courts, and Academic Policy — Part 2.”