Seniors at Texas A&M University-Commerce who recently graduated are facing a temporary delay in receiving their diplomas due to a professor’s misguided use of AI software to evaluate their final assignments.
According to a Reddit post by the partner of one of the affected students, a professor teaching agricultural sciences and natural resources sent an email to the students, explaining that he had used an AI chatbot called “Chat GTP” to determine if they had used the software to write their papers.
The issue is the chatbot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is not designed to detect AI-generated content, and its accuracy in determining the authorship of texts is questionable. He might have a little too paranoid about “Chat GTP.”
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Students claim to have provided evidence, such as timestamps on Google Documents, to prove that they had not used ChatGPT. However, the professor reportedly dismissed their claims and issued failing grades, stating, “I don’t grade AI bullshit.”
The affected student immediately sought assistance from university administrators, including the dean and the university president, to plead her case. Other students allegedly faced similar treatment from the professor, resulting in multiple failing grades.
In an ironic twist, a Reddit user conducted an experiment using ChatGPT and submitted a section of the professor’s doctoral dissertation on pig farming to the bot. Surprisingly, the chatbot responded that it could have generated the passage, indicating characteristics consistent with AI-generated content.
The student’s partner hopes that a meeting with the Dean of Agricultural Science will resolve the issue and shed light on the professor’s unfamiliarity with chatbots. The university confirmed awareness of the incident and clarified that no students had failed the course or been barred from graduating as a result.
“The professor in question is working individually with a few students regarding their last written assignments,” the university told PCMag, adding that “no students failed the class or were barred from graduating as a result of this issue. The professor is working with the students to determine whether AI was used to write their assignments and, if so, at what level.”
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