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Thursday, April 13, 2023

AI at Davis

As we noted, UCLA's policy with regard to supposed-AI detectors is not to use them because of problems with false positives.* Apparently, UC-Davis hasn't issued such a policy. From a USA Today article on this topic:

When [student name] logged into his student web portal to check the results of his history exam, he was shocked to see a cheating accusation from his professor attached to it. His professor had used artificial intelligence detection software including one called GPTZero after noticing that his exam answers "(bore) little resemblance to the questions" to detect whether the college senior had tapped artificial intelligence to give his take-home midterm exam a boost, according to school records provided to USA TODAY by [student name]. The professor was right, according to the software.

She issued him a failing grade and a referral to the University of California, Davis' Office of Student Support and Judicial Affairs for academic dishonesty in response. [Student name] denied he had any help from AI, but was asked to speak with the university's honor court in an experience he said caused him to have "full-blown panic attacks." He was eventually cleared of the accusation...

Full story at https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2023/04/12/how-ai-detection-tool-spawned-false-cheating-case-uc-davis/11600777002/.

Our own suggestion is to look for error-free writing in terms of grammar and spelling combined with incorrect statements of facts. Other possible steps would be to require term papers to be written in stages: first an outline, then a draft, then a final product. (Of course, such stages won't work for take-home exams.) A suspected paper might be compared with an in-person pen-and-paper writing sample on some random topic.

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/03/ucla-senate-guidelines-regarding-ai.html.

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