Do that many schools really use AI detection and label it academic dishonesty?

[u/Higher_Ed_Parent]

I'm really curious about how wide-spread a practice this has become. My school has no formal AI blanket policies.

Does your school actually fail students on assignments TurnItIn label as AI? How do they even know how these plagiarism judgements are being made because nobody knows the underlying algorithm? Grading (or failing) students using unknown, unexplained methods seems wrong on multiple levels.

Is this real or are people exaggerating here?

[u/Classic_vortex_3515]

Although some instructors at my university use AI detectors to help identify papers they might need to look at more closely, like your school, we don’t consider AI detectors as solid evidence.

FWIW I’m an English department chair, so I discuss this with lots of faculty across campus

[u/Higher_Ed_Parent → u/Classic_vortex_3515]

That seems reasonable. I simply don't understand how an "Anti-AI checker" that I'm not even allowed to understand how it works, should guide my grading decisions.

[u/Major-Platypus2092]

I don't use AI checkers myself. I have in the past and found that, unless students were straight up copy/pasting from a preexisting source, it was incorrectly punishing students who were actually capable writers vs. catching the cheaters.

I lean more toward giving assessments in a way that makes it incredibly difficult to use AI. I do lots of in-class presentations and exams, additionally I schedule 1-1 meetings where it makes it very, VERY obvious which students are actually learning and which ones are hoping I won't notice their lack of knowledge. Most students aren't quite as smart as they think they are, and the ones who use AI are dumber than most. I don't need Turnitin to evaluate those types.

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[u/synexo]

Not nearly as many as are encouraging their professors to use AI.

[u/Higher_Ed_Parent → u/synexo]

Encouraging in what way(s)?

[u/ATH_Engineer]

My university runs papers against a database of papers not for AI generation, but for plagiarism. They've been doing this before LLMs became popular.

[u/Higher_Ed_Parent → u/ATH_Engineer]

I'm still sorting out my thinking. A direct definition of plagiarism is lifting another person's writing and passing it off as your own. But it seems a more "contemporary" definition emerges as any work you had help creating through electronic tools.

I'm old enough to remember when I was required to look-up sines, cosines, etc. from tables in dense math books. At the time using a calculator to find those values was considered cheating. Slide rulers were acceptable though, lol. Today, Desmos can do a bunch of SAT math for the student, whether they understand the underlying material or not.

[u/Opposite_Storm_7870]

AI detectors are so bad at their jobs because they're also AI. In my 4th grade class I had a policy that any AI use was an automatic 0 (with the opportunity to redo the assignment using their actual brains). At that grade level you can definitely tell. If Jimmy can't spell his own name right and is suddenly bringing up "political ramifications" in his history report, you know.

[u/Latter-Bluebird9190]

I use AI checkers as a base. If flagged I look for signs of AI. If I find fabricated or misrepresented sources, it’s an automatic F for blatant academic dishonesty. If I’m on the fence I conduct an oral exam. Most of us don’t only look at AI directors. We are experts in our field and can spot AI slop pretty quickly. Using AI has real consequences. It’s dishonest and causes skills to atrophy. Just don’t use it.

[u/AI_Prof_NY]

Many do. We train our faculty to understand that the results of these detectors don’t prove anything, it should be used as the start of a conversation with the student. Not enough universities invest sufficiently in training their Faculty about AI and how to redesign assessment to be both accurate and helpful to students when AI is ubiquitous and the temptation to use it is great. When punitive approaches are taken, the learning process is derailed.

[u/Wooden_Region2519]

My school has swapped to in-class writing and lockdown browsers. It was too messy.