Author’s Note: I publicly share this memo, sent to my students during the fall of 2025, in hopes that others who are young may discover its truths. I am hopeful that the small number of students who have caused this recent disruption in my life will rethink who they are to become, and will recognize that they have also negatively affected the lives of the many honest, trustworthy students I care so deeply for, who are in my classes now and in the future.
Last week was difficult for me. Some students cheated on a midterm exam. Others used AI (LLMs) to summarize their readings or videos they were to watch, and then submitted AI’s output as Perusall annotations or in discussion board postings as if it were their own. Other students ignored classroom rules – texting on their phones, or surfing the web on their laptops. One student wore headphones to watch a video during a class discussion rather than engage with others in the classroom.
I was hurt, emotionally. But so were the students in my classes who adhered to the rules, yet who were betrayed by classmates who engaged in actions that destroyed the fairness of assessments and clouded the learning environment – built on trust and respect – that together we had sought to create. While they might not have yet realized it, those who caused the pain also hurt themselves.
Please permit me to share some thoughts with you…
Life is All About Relationships
You are living through a season defined by relationships: the friendships you are forming, the study groups that carry you through difficult courses, the roommates, fraternity brothers, sorority sisters, teammates, and friends who become like family. The professors and staff who mentor you. All these relationships are shaping who you are becoming.
Your college years offer a unique laboratory for building relational skills that will determine your success far more than your GPA. The professional networks, collaborative abilities, and capacity to navigate conflict – these competencies will open or close doors throughout your life.
You are not here merely to accumulate credits; you are here to become someone capable of meaningful connection in an increasingly fragmented world.
And, when you near the end of your life, you will discover that those relationships you have embraced throughout your life, including those relationships long in the past as well as still around you, are all that really matter.
About That Fragile Architecture of Trust
Every meaningful relationship stands or falls on trust. When your study partner shows up prepared, when your friend keeps a confidence, when you honor a commitment despite competing priorities – trust is being built or eroded.
In academics, trust operates on multiple levels simultaneously. Your classmates trust that, when working on team projects, you will contribute your fair share and not free ride. Your professors trust that your work represents your own thinking and effort, not AI-generated content. Future employers trust that your degree signifies genuine competence, not clever corner cutting. They hope that you will be a person who they, and people within their organizations, can trust.
When you cheat – whether copying homework, using unauthorized resources during an exam, or submitting AI-generated work as your own – you are not simply breaking abstract rules. You are betraying everyone in the ecosystem: classmates whose honest work won’t rise above your inflated scores; professors who invested time in creating meaningful assessments; and future colleagues who will depend on skills you pretended to have. More importantly, you are ultimately betraying yourself.
Trust operates under a cruel mathematical principle. It accumulates slowly, like sediment depositing layer by layer. Yet it shatters instantly, like a window struck by stone. Each small promise kept, each vulnerability honored, each consistency between word and deed adds a thin layer of trust. But when that trust breaks, something fundamental shifts. The broken trust doesn’t simply erase positive history; it recontextualizes it. Others are suddenly re-examining every interaction: “Were those other times genuine,” that person asks. “Or was I being naive?”
Betrayal doesn’t just damage the present – it casts doubt on the entire past and clouds the future.
Rebuilding trust is exponentially harder than building it initially. Why? Because you’re working against active resistance rather than neutral openness. Humans are predisposed to trust as a default, but once you have broken that trust, you face a skeptic who learned through painful experience that you can’t be relied upon. Every action is scrutinized. Every promise is met with “I’ve heard that before.” The person you betrayed has erected defensive walls – and they should. Once broken, and regardless of the effort put forth, trust is never fully restored. In the world of academia. In the world of business. And in personal relationships.
Integrity: Who You are When No One is Watching
This brings us to integrity – doing the right thing even when no one is watching. Even when others around you seem to be cutting corners. And even when it costs you something.
Integrity is not about perfection. You will make mistakes, miss deadlines, perform poorly despite honest effort. Rather, integrity is about the internal compass that guides you when external accountability disappears.
Integrity is essential, every day. It is admitting that you don’t understand, rather than nodding along. It is acknowledging which parts of the group project you actually contributed to. It is doing the right thing when no one else is watching.
Here’s what your future self needs you to understand: every time you choose the easier wrong over the harder right, you are not just risking getting caught – you are proceeding down a path in which you become a person that you, yourself, won’t respect. The pattern you establish now creates the person you become.
Become Great. Live an Extraordinary Life. It Requires This Foundation.
The connection between relationships, trust, and integrity forms the foundation of a life that matters. You are either becoming someone whose word means something or someone who always has an excuse.
The temptation to cheat is real – the pressures are intense, the opportunities available, the rationalization seemingly easy. But understand what you are really choosing: a few points on an assignment in exchange for a piece of your character.
The world desperately needs people who can be counted on, who tell the truth even when uncomfortable, and who keep their integrity intact when the cameras are off. Your college years are where you decide which kind of person you will be.
Choose to be someone you can trust, and you’ll become someone others can trust, too. That reputation, that character, that integrity – those are credentials no one can take from you, if you possess them.
I want you to become extraordinary. Not mediocre. I wish for you to become exceptional, in all aspects of your life. But such is not possible should you fail to properly value relationships, should you betray (through actions or inactions large or small) the trust others place in you, or should you lack personal integrity.
Work every day to become someone you respect when you look in the mirror – someone whose word you can trust, whose choices you can defend, whose character you’ve earned.
– Dr. Ron Rhoades, Oct. 4, 2025