Connor Boyack Confesses He Cheated Through School and College: Why the Education System Creates Cheaters
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Connor Boyack Confesses He Cheated Through School and College: Why the Education System Creates Cheaters
Connor Boyack shares a surprising confession: he cheated extensively throughout his public school education in California, all the way through college. Rather than expressing regret, Boyack argues that his cheating was a rational response to a fundamentally broken education system that prioritizes grades over genuine learning. He explains how schools focus on extrinsic motivation, teaching to the test, and isolating students rather than fostering intrinsic curiosity and collaborative learning. After graduating college, Boyack discovered a genuine love for learning when freed from the constraints of traditional schooling. He explores why the majority of students cheat, how the modern education system fails to reflect authentic human learning, and why his own children are homeschooled. This candid discussion challenges parents to reconsider what true education means and how the current system inadvertently encourages the very behaviors it seeks to punish.
Connor Boyack has a confession to make: he cheated extensively throughout his entire education, from elementary school all the way through college. But this isn't a story of regret or moral failing. Instead, Boyack argues that his cheating was a symptom of a fundamentally broken education system that prioritizes superficial outcomes over genuine learning.
Boyack grew up in San Diego, California, attending public schools during the 1980s and 90s. He now lives in Utah, joking that he left California back when you could still find a U-Haul truck to get out. His mother still apologizes for not homeschooling him, though at the time it wasn't a common option—homeschooling was something only "the weird kid on the compound" did.
Grades Over Learning
The first major problem Boyack encountered in the public school system was that grades, not learning, were the ultimate outcome. Teachers taught to the test, and young Boyack quickly learned that curiosity and comprehension didn't matter—only test performance did.
He recalls raising his hand multiple times as a student to ask why certain information was important or what its significance was. The teacher's response was almost always the same: "It's going to be on the test." This taught him that the test itself mattered, not the subject, not comprehension, and certainly not retention of information after the class ended.
Teachers had one job: drill information into students' heads so they could regurgitate it for the test, then move on to the next thing. As Boyack progressed through school at ages 9, 10, and 11, he began to realize that if grades were all that mattered, he could optimize for that outcome through the path of least resistance—procrastinating, not doing homework, borrowing assignments from friends, looking over shoulders during tests, and sneaking cheat sheets into class.
He started doing this consistently, focusing solely on getting good grades rather than becoming a well-rounded, critically thinking, independent-minded person who could absorb, analyze, and synthesize information to make the world a better place. None of that was the expressed goal from his parents or teachers. Instead, the focus was on myopic milestones: make sure you get good grades, do your homework, pass the test.
Extrinsic Versus Intrinsic Motivation
The second reason Boyack cheated was the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. His parents would threaten him if he got bad grades and sometimes reward him if he got good ones. He even drove past a billboard advertising a local bank that would make free deposits into kids' savings accounts if they earned A's.
These extrinsic motivations—the carrot and the stick—represent a command-and-control, authoritarian approach. It's about getting people on a conveyor belt to move faster or produce better output through threats or incentives. This top-down model is a fundamental problem with the education system.
Young Boyack was surrounded by extrinsic motivation. At one point, his opportunity to get a driver's license was conditioned on his grades. He wanted to drive, to hang out with friends, to have independence. So he optimized—taking shortcuts and cheating to get good grades and avoid punishment while obtaining rewards.
He possessed no intrinsic motivation. He didn't understand the power of knowledge or find the world amazing. He didn't love learning—in fact, he hated studying and thought learning and studying were the same thing because everything was memorize, memorize, memorize. He didn't read for fun or enjoy learning things. It was all command and control, all regurgitation, all doing what someone else wanted.
This approach is endemic to society. When someone carries the stick, the person being incentivized doesn't necessarily do well—they just make it look like they did well to get the reward or avoid punishment. They create a superficial appearance of success rather than genuine achievement. That was Boyack's experience with grades: he wasn't acquiring knowledge or learning to love learning, just doing whatever was necessary to avoid punishment and get rewards.
Isolated Learning in a Collaborative World
The third problem Boyack experienced was isolation. Students in school are treated as isolated individuals who must independently arrive at the same answers, learn things on their own, and complete assignments without help or support. When taking a test, it's not a group effort—it's a measurement of individual knowledge, memorization, and recall.
Reflecting on this, Boyack realizes he hated it because it's artificial and doesn't reflect how the real world works. At his organization, Libertas Institute, when trying to accomplish something or learn a new project, he doesn't send team members to individually figure things out in isolation without resources or support. The opposite is true—these are collaborative efforts.
Schools generally don't emphasize collaboration. Instead, they create competition, especially when students are graded on a curve relative to others' performance. Boyack cheated because he wanted other people's help.
In college, studying IT, he remembers a particularly difficult assignment he couldn't understand despite repeated attempts. So he copy-pasted someone else's code (he used to be a web developer), tweaked it slightly, but didn't understand it at all. In later years doing web development projects, he used online resources, talked to colleagues, had them hold his hand, shadowed them, and learned collaboratively.
In the real world, we learn collaboratively through peer support. That's not what students experience in schools, where they're forced to memorize things individually and demonstrate individual performance rather than engage in shared, collaborative learning. Boyack cheated because it was the path of least resistance—some material was confusing, he still needed good grades for external incentives, so he took shortcuts.
Regrets About School, Not Cheating
When Boyack confesses this at public speaking events, parents sometimes ask if he regrets cheating. His typical response: No, he regrets going to school. Cheating, to him, is a symptom of a broken system.
Polls and studies show that the majority of kids have cheated. Boyack isn't unique—he's explaining why he did it to illustrate why tons of other kids do it too. The majority of students have cheated at least once in the past year. Boyack cheated extensively, and he believes many other kids do as well.
Cheating is no anomaly in the system—it's a byproduct of a system with bad incentives. It results from a system that doesn't help kids develop intrinsic motivation to learn, that teaches what instead of why (facts rather than context), that drills kids with content to memorize and regurgitate for tests while depriving them of time to understand why that content matters historically and in their lives today.
An Artificial Learning Process
Schools represent an artificial learning process that doesn't reflect how individuals actually learn. It's not how adults learn or how we function in society. We are social creatures who collaboratively help one another, lean on each other, ask for and give help. We're in this together—no one is atomized as an individual effort.
Yet schools segment kids and force them to learn individually. They bring the stick, parents bring the carrot, and they try to motivate behavior. But ultimately it's not about learning, retention, and application—it's just about grades. This learning model is completely upside down, which is why Boyack hated learning, hated reading, and really didn't like school.
Discovering Authentic Learning After College
Only after college, when Boyack suddenly had free time to come up for air without tests, assignments, projects, and expectations, did things change. He had curiosity that had been suppressed because he hadn't been trained or empowered to follow it. He'd been mentally fatigued at the end of each school day, especially with all the homework, never having time to pursue curiosity because it was always suppressed behind other expectations.
After graduating college with free time and lingering curiosity, Boyack started reading about things that interested him—American history and economics. Ironically, he'd done horribly in those subjects in school. Yet here he was developing interest and curiosity for them. He read books, then books those authors recommended, then went down research rabbit holes online because it was interesting and fascinating.
It wasn't about getting a grade. He wasn't being tested. No one threatened him if he didn't memorize the right things. He wasn't being externally incentivized by parents or teachers. He wasn't expected to do it alone—he asked other people questions, absorbed information from various sources, not just official textbooks where he couldn't ask anyone else.
He was learning how humans authentically learn, reaching out and getting help from all kinds of people. It was pursuit of knowledge itself, not arbitrary expectations of being evaluated on memorizing eight specific things a teacher extracted from a big textbook and put on a test. All of that was gone. He could focus on what he was curious about, and it was amazing.
Now Boyack loves learning and reading. He's a big advocate of education, quite the opposite of what he experienced in school. As the saying goes: never let school get in the way of your education. School did exactly that for him, and it was only afterward that he realized how powerful education is.
Cheating as a Symptom, Not a Moral Failing
Boyack cheated, and he's not morally or ethically justifying it. But he does think it's a symptom of a broken system. Had he been in an educational environment that allowed him to pursue his curiosities, that taught context not just content, that focused on knowledge acquisition and application rather than pump-and-dump memorization and regurgitation for tests, he would have thrived much more.
This is why he homeschooled his kids for so long. Now they attend an acting academy where the focus isn't memorizing stuff for arbitrary tests—it's about the individual, supporting them as good people, character development, growing in ways that help them acquire good knowledge about how the world works and how they can apply that knowledge to play their own role in the world.
Cause and Effect
Yes, Boyack cheated. Yes, this is a confession. Does he feel remorseful? Not in any way. He looks at it as cause and effect—his cheating was an effect of awful systemic causes in the school system. These are things he's trying to correct for with his own kids.
Does that mean any kid in public school is justified in cheating? Maybe not necessarily. Boyack thinks there are ways to do public schooling where parents can counteract some of these problems, but it's an uphill battle because the system is fundamentally broken. And cheating, he maintains, is a byproduct of that broken system.
