Professors caught them cheating & fudging attendance. They used AI to apologise

Confronted with allegations that they had cheated in an introductory data science course and fudged their attendance, dozens of undergraduates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently sent two professors a mea culpa via email.

But there was one problem, a glaring one: They had not written the emails. Artificial intelligence had, according to the professors, Karle Flanagan and Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider, an academic pair known to their students and social media followers as the Data Science Duo.The students got their comeuppance in a large lecture hall on Oct 17, when the professors read aloud their identical, less-than-genuine apologies from a projector screen, video from that class showed.

Busted. The professors posted about it on social media, where the gotcha moment drew widespread attention."They said, 'Dear Professor Flanagan, I want to sincerely apologise,'" Professor Flanagan said. "And I was like, Thank you. They're owning up to it. They're apologising. And then I got another email, the second email, and then the third. And then everybody sort of sincerely apologising, and suddenly it became a little less sincere."

At a time when educational institutions are grappling with the intrusion of machine learning into classrooms and homework assignments, the university professors said they decided to use the episode to teach a lesson in academic integrity. They did not take disciplinary action against the students. "You can hear the students laugh in the background of the video," Professor Fagen-Ulmschneider said. "They very well knew that it was something that they could see themselves doing.

"Although the university's student code covers cheating and plagiarism, the professors said that they were not aware of specific rules applying to the use of AI.Allison Copenbarger Vance, a deputy associate chancellor, said in an email that the students would not be punished. "At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, it is the discretion of faculty to clearly define the boundaries in their syllabi for using AI in student work," she said.

Referring to Professor Flanagan, she added, "In this case, the students' behaviour didn't violate the policies outlined in her syllabus, so no disciplinary action was warranted.

"Vinayak Bagdi, 21, who graduated in May with a degree in statistics, took the class as a freshman to fulfill his academic requirements. Four years later, he said, the professors' dedication to demystifying statistics had stuck with him. He described the professors as being heavily invested in the success of students. That made it disheartening that some students had used AI, Bagdi said. "You're not even coming to the class, and then you can't even send a sincere email to the professor saying, 'I apologise'?" he said.

"Out of any class at university, why skip that one?" NYT