Professors catch students using AI after spotting same mistake in emails
Two professors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign quickly realized that a good chunk of their students were using AI to respond to an email the pair had sent out
Over recent years, artificial intelligence usage has emerged as a major controversy in educational settings as educators worry students will resort to academic dishonesty.
Though most pupils believe they're outsmarting their instructors, AI usage typically stands out like a sore thumb. Two faculty members at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign rapidly discovered that a substantial portion of their students were employing AI to craft responses to an email the duo had distributed.
Professors Karle Flanagan and Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider co-teach a course at the university's Grainger College of Engineering, and they are recognized as the Data Science Duo across social platforms.
In an Instagram update, the educators revealed they utilize an application called the Clicker that monitors class engagement and attendance.
"We started to realize that there were way more people answering the Clicker questions than were actually in class," Flanagan explained.
"We reached out to them with a warning and asked them, 'Please explain what you just did,'" said Fagen-Ulmschneider.
When the first student responded to this warning email, they wrote, "I sincerely apologize for my misuse of the data science clicker."
It wasn't until they received a second and third email response with the exact same opening line that they figured out that their students were consulting AI to write their emails. "All of a sudden, I sent over 100 emails; 80% of them or more say, 'I sincerely apologize for my misuse of the data science clicker,'" said Flanagan.
"And we realized they were all using AI to 'sincerely apologize.'".
"Then suddenly, it became way less sincere," noted Fagen-Ulmschneider.
It became clear that their apologies lacked any originality, and it was glaringly obvious that numerous students weren't crafting their own emails with their personal thoughts. Rather, they were having basic email responses created for them automatically.
To deliver a powerful lesson to the students, the professors chose to capture screenshots of all the identical email responses and display them on their projector screen for the class to witness during their next session.
"And life lesson, if you're going to apologize, don't use ChatGPT to do it," said Flanagan.
This incident became a viral sensation on Reddit and various social media platforms. In the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Subreddit, students and educators share their perspectives on this academic dishonesty controversy.
One user commented, "As the staff member who gets all the FAIR notifications for this course, it's been a rough week for my inbox."
At this institution, FAIR notices are Faculty Academic Integrity Reports that professors can utilize to flag possible academic integrity violations, according to the university's academic integrity guide. "Had to fail someone for using uncited AI today. Had they cited it, they'd receive a passing grade. This was made clear on the class syllabus. I expect to receive an email with lines like this pretty soon," another user commented.
"ChatGPT generated apologies," one person joked about the unusual situation.
"Bro this class is not even that hard man. I literally took it fall 21, and yeah it was some work but it was not even hard," a former student commented. "The professors genuinely put a lot of work into making the class teachable, which is a lot better than like half the professors in the Stat and CS departments."