It has never been easier for a student to get an answer without doing the work.

Take a picture of a math problem.

Upload it.

Ask AI to solve it.

Seconds later, there's the answer—often with all the work neatly written out.

So what happens when cheating becomes that easy?

That's the question Adam Grant recently explored in a New York Times article about cheating in the age of AI.

And I think it's an important question for parents, too.

We can put rules around technology. Teachers can change assignments. Schools can try to detect AI use.

But eventually, a student is going to be alone with a choice.

Do I do the work, or do I find a way around it?

Math makes this especially easy to see.

If the only goal is to get the right answer, having AI solve the problem might seem pretty efficient.

But the answer was never really the point.

I remember the days when the answer keys were readily available in every book.

I was thrilled.

Not because it was an easy way for me to get the answer.

And not because I could just put an answer down and walk away.

In my mind, it was a challenge.

I would think through the problem.

Review what I understood.

Study the examples again.

Try something.

Maybe get it wrong and have to try again.

And if I didn't know, I felt like I had a puzzle to solve. I would try and try again until I could get the right answer.

Until I got the satisfaction of having faced the challenge and conquered it.

I believed that was where I would grow—where the learning happened.

But if AI does all of the work for students, they may end up with a beautiful page of correct answers.

But they've lost the opportunity to learn.

The page learned more than they did.

That's an important conversation to have with our kids.

Sometimes looking at the answers is a perfectly appropriate tool. It's a way to understand something we don't know.

But it can also be an easy way out.

In the end, the question isn't simply, “Should you be able to use AI to get the answer?”

Maybe better questions are:

“What do we lose when we let AI take away the struggle that's helping us learn?”

and

“Is this helping students think, or is it doing the thinking for them?”

Because eventually, our kids have to learn to make that distinction for themselves.

There won't always be a teacher or a parent watching.

At some point, they have to decide how they live and grow when no one is watching.

And that's much bigger than math.
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P.S. If you'd like to read the New York Times opinion piece that got me thinking about this, you can find the article here.​