Monday, April 10, 2023

Brave new world that has such AI in it

The AI detection software said the student's essay was 100 percent generated by Artificial Intelligence, which confirmed my suspicions but also threw me into a quandary--What am I supposed to do now?

I know how to handle plagiarism. The details differ a little each time, but once I've confirmed that a chunk of text was copied from an online source (and it's always an online source--gone are the days of hunting down stolen passages in the library stacks), I follow a very clear series of steps laid out in our faculty guidelines: confer with the department chair, meet with the student, apply the penalty, send a report to the Provost's office. The student may complain that it's purely coincidental that a whole paragraph from a paper perfectly matches some online source, but if the evidence is clear, I have confidence in the process.

Now here we are in a brave new world where I don't know where to start. I've already made changes to assure that future syllabi will include language dealing with AI-generated text, but this semester's syllabi don't even mention AI, unless AI is covered under the prohibition on having someone else write or significantly revise a paper. 

Further, I don't know exactly what that "100 percent AI" score means or what will happen when I confront the student with the problem. If the student denies getting an AI to write his paper, how do I contest that? The algorithm says you're guilty? I just don't feel confident that this is going to go well.

So I asked for help. I'm working with our instructional technologist to make sure I understand the issues and possess the evidence before I meet with the student. Brave new world indeed! Why can't I just retire right now?

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