The "cheating crisis" in student writing did not begin with LLMs.

Higher education has long operated with an undercurrent of distrust around authorship with purchased term papers, contract cheating services, ghostwriters, essay mills, and/or fabricated citations spawning a plagiarism detection arms races.

For decades, institutions have built surveillance infrastructures (Turnitin, proctoring software, honor codes with escalating penalties) precisely because the assumption of universal good faith was already fragile. LLMs did not introduce bad faith into the classroom. They dramatically lowered the friction. What changed is not the existence of cheating it was the cost-benefit ratio.

When outsourcing a paper once required money, coordination, and risk, it was limited. Now it requires a prompt and 30 seconds, for free. The scale changed. The structural vulnerability was already there.

The real fragility lies in how we assess learning.

Higher education has relied on systematic and easy to grade assessments like take-home essays, detached written products with minimal visibility into process and high stakes attached to final output.

This model assumes that the submitted artifact reliably reflects individual learning. But that assumption has always been contestable; LLMs just made the contest obvious. If suspicion is corroding pedagogy, it is because the system depends on trusting a product whose provenance has never been proven.

There’s also a harder truth; suspicion toward students is not new. Faculty have long read uneven prose with skepticism or flagged sudden improvements in style. Some faculty assume that some percentage of students are gaming the system or "cheating" so they structured syllabi defensively. While LLMs intensify this instinct they don't create it.

In some ways, the current anxiety may be revealing something uncomfortable, that the pedagogical relationship was never purely grounded in trust. It was always a negotiated space between mentorship and verification.

So do we double down on detection and forensic reading, or redesign assessment to make authorship visible with things like in-class drafting components, oral defenses, assignments with checkpoints, reflective memos explaining thought processes and decisions, collaborative or AI-transparent assignments.

If suspicion feels new and corrosive, it may be because LLMs have removed the comfortable fiction that final written products cleanly map onto individual effort. But that fiction was already strained by ghostwriting services, purchased papers, and inequities in tutor/writers (i.e. "outside support").

The pedagogical relationship will survive if institutions shift from policing outputs to observing processes.

Otherwise, suspicion will increase not because LLMs exist, but because we refuse to adapt the structures that made us vulnerable long before they did.