Students Battle Unfair AI Cheating Accusations In College

The Shock of a Zero: An AI False Alarm

A few weeks into her sophomore year of college, Leigh Burrell received a notification that made her stomach drop. She had been given a zero on an assignment, a mock cover letter, that accounted for 15 percent of her final grade in a required writing course. Her professor's brief note explained the devastating reason: he believed she had used an A.I. chatbot to compose her paper.

“My heart just freaking stops,” said Ms. Burrell, 23, a computer science major at the University of Houston-Downtown.

However, Ms. Burrell’s work was entirely her own. An examination of her Google Docs editing history, reviewed by The New York Times, clearly showed she had drafted and revised the assignment over two days. Despite this, her paper was flagged by an A.I. detection service from Turnitin, a company known for its plagiarism-detection tools.

“I was so frustrated and paranoid that my grade was going to suffer because of something I didn’t do,” said Leigh Burrell, who was given a zero on an important assignment because of her professor’s suspicions that she had used A.I. to complete it. In her appeal of the decision, she pulled out all the stops. Credit: Hope Mora for The New York Times

The Fight to Prove Innocence

Panicked by the accusation and the potential impact on her academic record, Ms. Burrell decided to appeal the decision. The process was arduous. She compiled a comprehensive 15-page PDF, including time-stamped screenshots and detailed notes from her writing process, which she then submitted to the chair of her English department. Her efforts paid off, and her grade was eventually restored.

A New Burden for Honest Students

This episode, though resolved, left Ms. Burrell acutely aware of the new challenges facing students in an academic world increasingly concerned about A.I. cheating. Even those who maintain their academic integrity can find themselves under suspicion, forced to go to extraordinary lengths to prove their work is original.

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