College student put on academic probation for using Grammarly: 'AI violation'
nypost.com
nypost.com
She claims she only used it "to fix spelling and punctuation errors, not to create or edit content"
But how would an plagiarism detector pick up that she fixed spelling and punctuation mistakes using grammarly? If she never made those mistakes in the first place, and didn't use grammarly at all, shouldn't the detector still call it AI generated?
So, this story is either about an AI detector that detects human writing as AI, or it is about a lady lying about to what extent she used AI to write her paper. Or maybe the university is spying on what extensions are installed on student laptops, or sniffing network requests, I don't know.
On a final note, is it cheating if I let a friend proofread my paper and offer me suggestions? Why would AI be any different? Clearly it is cheating if my friend actually writes the paper for me, as it would be if AI wrote the paper for me.
This state is shifting as AI improves, and is unlikely to ever theoretically hit 100% correctness (but may ultimately theoretically hit 0% correctness) .
At best you can may be able to use such a detection as a flag to prompt further investigation. This much may or may not be warranted based on the state of AI detection at point X in time.
However, you should not use AI detection software alone to serve as proof or disproof.
These detectors produce tons of false positives all the time. You really can not conclude much from the fact that it detected something.
Just yesterday, Google added AI features to my Workspace account. Now, when I open a Google Doc, a handy menu appears offering to change the tone of the text, lengthen or shorten it, convert it to bullet points, or follow my custom prompt. When I’ve asked it to correct text that contains grammatical and spelling errors, it cleans up the mistakes while making only minor changes to the wording. It will also write a new text from scratch—no need to cut and paste from Gemini or ChatGPT.
It won’t be easy, but educators will just have to figure out new methods of teaching and evaluation that assume that students have powerful AI tools available at all times.
We had to write (with our hands) the program on paper during a 3 hour exam where we couldn't leave the room and teacher checked them all manually.
I guess this guy had been a cobol teacher for so long that his brain was part human, part compiler.
He was wise enough to know that a few missing ; or . weren't a big deal and that the core logic was the most important stuff.
And during our exercises session before the exam, any editor outside of the dos edit was prohibited.
No wonder I always have a feeling of cheating whenever copilot finishes half of my code.
I'd like to see the actual paper. Turning a student in for plagiarism is a serious action and not taken lightly. I think the instructor had other clues besides machine alerts.
In this case the instructor did not turn the student in for plagiarism. The student went to the board of academic integrity herself in an attempt to undo the instructors decision to fail her.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2366824-reliably-detect...
It tells you what it thinks of your papers before you turn it in. I think the threshold can be adjusted depending on the school using it. But my expectations from using it, is that it tells you before your turnitin where the discrepancies are, and it gives you a chance to fix them.
So I'm not sure how it's possible to submit with this big of a discrepancy.
Native speakers usually make subtle "mistakes"*, or even mess with grammar intentionally, while ESL speakers can and do learn to do this, there's a weird line of "Does this make sense to other people without my context" that does create a difference in how often you do it
This is best exemplified by the trope of "Sorry for my broken english", followed by some of the most terse prose you have ever read
*Is it a mistake if it's widely used? Or even done intentionally?
Using LLMs for making comment in broken English is very easy thing. It help much because you can type and it give back what you need, but with simple English. Very good tool for who not first language English.
(I'd give it a 3/10. It manages the broken English, but its errors don't really represent the kind of broken English requested.)
Well, it does pass in the sense that I would never guess that this was AI generated.
While AI detection software can easily have a false negative, it's much less likely to have a false positive.
The instructor used 2 confirmations. Turnitin and the other tool. That makes the likely of false positive even lower.
The grammarly part is just a distraction from the main concern, which is whether the main portions of the paper were AI generated or not.
If I was the decision maker, I would count it against the student, HOWEVER, I would give a first warning, not academic probation.
I would also allow students to pass their papers through the exact same software (Turnitin) to pre screen their papers. Can this lead to students not being caught just by editng the parts which Turnitin thinks was generated? Yes, HOWEVER, it still makes the students work for that pass instead of them suddenly getting the axe.
However, it's early days.
If you have a minute, can you explain in a little more detail why you believe these tools are reliable? (or what (may) make(s) them reliable, or reliable enough?) . And/or do you have a source that explains it? Or a place to start reading on why people think these tools are effective?
To what extent does the software simply overfit on OpenAI’s house writing style? And to the extent that students may simply learn to imitate that writing style, what theoretical basis is there for this software having any validity?
Anyway, until AI tools become standard, my advice to students and researchers is to use version control systems to document every step of the evolution of a paper. That's what I'm going to do while I'm still in Academia (not that I plan to stay, after 16 years I've had enough of this nonsense).
Undergraduates are not and never will be doing anything original. And most of the work is getting them to point where they can produce at least something in pretty standard style and format.