Caught cheating in class, college students “apologized” using AI—and profs called them out

With a child in college and a spouse who’s a professor, I have front-row access to the unfolding debacle that is “higher education in the age of AI.”

These days, students routinely submit even “personal reflection” papers that are AI generated. (And routinely appear surprised when caught.)

Read a paper longer than 10 pages? Not likely—even at elite schools. Toss that sucker into an AI tool and read a quick summary instead. It’s more efficient!

So the University of Illinois story that has been running around social media for the last week (and which then bubbled up into The New York Times yesterday) caught my attention as an almost perfect encapsulation of the current higher ed experience… and how frustrating it can be for everyone involved.

Data Science Discovery is an introductory course taught by statistics professor Karle Flanagan and the gloriously named computer scientist Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider, whose website features a logo that says, “Keep Nerding Out.”

Attendance and participation counts for a small portion of the course grade, and the professors track this with a tool called the Data Science Clicker. Students attending class each day are shown a QR code, which, after being scanned, takes them to a multiple-choice question that appears to vary by person. They have a limited time window to answer the question—around 90 seconds.

A few weeks into this fall semester, the professors realized that far more students were answering the questions—and thus claiming to be “present”—than were actually in the lecture hall. (The course has more than 1,000 students in it, across multiple sections.) According to the Times, “The teachers said they started checking how many times students refreshed the site and the IP addresses of their devices, and began reviewing server logs.” Students were apparently being told by people from the class when the questions were going live.