Academic Integrity in the Age of Generative AI: Challenges to Critical Thinking and Ethical Scholarship

Abstract

The dynamic development of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has greatly changed the academic culture in higher education, both bringing some opportunities and challenges to the area of learning, assessment, and ethical scholarship. Although AI applications can be used to improve efficiency and facilitate engagement among students, the proliferation of AI tools has brought up serious questions of academic honesty and the loss of critical thinking abilities. This study critically examines recent empirical research, institutional policies, and international guidelines published between 2023 and 2026 to explore how generative AI influences student cognition, assessment validity, and integrity enforcement. The evidence suggests that unorganized use of AI can cause cognitive offloading, decrease long-term learning, and become more difficult to check authorship, and the traditional models of assessment become more susceptible to AI-generated submissions. Nevertheless, it also indicates that in case of an integrated approach to AI, it could also serve as a scaffold that facilitates reflective thinking and skill acquisition. The study concludes that sustaining academic integrity in the generative AI era requires assessment redesign, transparent disclosure norms, and comprehensive AI literacy education to ensure that critical thinking remains central to higher education.