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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
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Robert Topinka

The software says my student cheated using AI. They say they’re innocent. Who do I believe?

Robert Topinka Turnitin ChatGPT
Student in a library
‘It’s not hard to find students sharing tips online about evading AI detection with paraphrasing tools and AI ‘humanisers’.’ Photograph: Aleksei Gorodenkov/Alamy

When I sat down to mark undergraduate student essays in the spring of 2023, the hype around ChatGPT was already at giddy heights. Like teachers everywhere, I was worried that students would succumb to the temptation to outsource their thinking to the machine. Many universities, including mine, responded by adopting AI detection software, and I soon had my fears confirmed when it provided the following judgment on one of the essays: “100% AI-generated”.

Essays are marked anonymously, so my heart dropped when I found out that the first “100% AI-generated” essay I marked belonged to a brilliant, incisive thinker whose essays in the pre-ChatGPT era were consistently excellent, if somewhat formulaic in style.

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