College students are booing commencement speakers celebrating AI, but the wave of hate hasn’t stopped them from using it to cheat on their exams

For today’s college students, attitudes toward AI can seem paradoxical. On one hand, they’ve made their ire toward the technology clear: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was met with hisses during his commencement remarks at the University of Arizona’s graduation ceremony on Sunday when he invoked the inevitability of a future with artificial intelligence. “The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will,” Schmidt said, pausing for a moment as students booed. “The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence.” Just days earlier, real estate executive Gloria Caulfield told graduating students at the University of Central Florida, “The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.” One audience member jeered in response, “AI sucks.” But the outward disgust toward the AI boom doesn’t tell the full story of the 2026 graduating class’s relationship to AI. The same cohort is also adopting the technology at a rapid clip, with 57% of U.S. college students reporting using the AI tools in their coursework weekly, and 20% using it daily, according to the Lumina Foundation-Gallup 2026 State of Higher Education study published last month. Some are even using this tool illicitly in the classroom. Jacob Shelley, an associate professor of health law at Western University, said he was overwhelmingly convinced his students cheated on the final exam for one of his classes, with many using AI tools to do so. “The results were anomalous,” he told Fortune, noting 8% of his class getting a perfect score on the multiple choice section of the exam while many either struggled on the essay portion or gave written responses with content Shelley hadn’t taught in class. “That just never happened in 20 years of teaching.” Princeton University faculty voted last week to rescind its 133-year-old honor code and proctor all in-person exams to mitigate cheating using AI. Stanford University senior Theo Baker wrote in a New York Times op-ed this week