WITHIN ARM’S REACH: DOES UBIQUITOUS SMART-DEVICE ACCESS DRIVE AI-ASSISTED CHEATING IN SOUTH KOREAN CLASSROOMS, OR IS IT A QUESTION OF ETHICAL PRACTICE?

Abstract

South Korea combines near-universal smartphone ownership, a highly competitive examination culture and rapid uptake of generative artificial intelligence (AI). This combination invites a pressing question: does easy access to smart devices make AI-assisted cheating more likely, or is the decisive factor the ethical practice that surrounds device use? This article reports a qualitative evidence synthesis that applies reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and thematic synthesis procedures (Thomas & Harden, 2008) to a purposively assembled corpus of 48 scholarly and policy sources on academic integrity, generative AI, digital behaviour and Korean education. Six themes were developed: ubiquitous access and low-effort opportunity; academic pressure and competitive culture; ambiguous norms and policy gaps; rationalisation and moral disengagement; detection limits and assessment design; and ethical literacy and institutional response. The synthesis supports a conditional answer. Access is a necessary enabling condition that lowers the cost of misconduct, but it is not a sufficient cause. Whether access becomes cheating depends on how pressure, perceived norms and rationalisation interact with assessment design and institutional clarity. A conceptual model and stakeholder implications are proposed. Because direct Korean empirical evidence on AI-related cheating remains thin, the findings are presented as theory-building propositions to be tested through interviews and focus groups with Korean students and instructors.

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© The Author(s). Published by Multidisciplinary Journal For Advance Research under the CC BY 4.0 licence, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.