Artificial intelligence can be a great tool, especially for college students. But at Memorial University, AI is starting to cause a lot of confusion over what counts as plagiarism.
Programs like ChatGPT and Grammarly can greatly speed up report creation.
Students’ unions have reported a significant increase in plagiarism accusations against students and are urging caution for students who choose to take advantage of the help of AI.
Mackenzie Broaders, executive director of advocacy for the MUN Student Union, said many students don’t even realize that using AI tools can put them in trouble.
”[Programs] It can be used to check grammar, spelling, sentence structure, etc. It’s a great resource for that kind of use,” she said.
“But what’s actually happening is that ChatGPT or Grammarly will often rearrange your writing and present your argument, perhaps in a slightly different way. It is academic misconduct to take the written text, incorporate it into a paper, and immediately submit it to the professor.”
Is it worth the risk?
Professors can use online AI checkers to track plagiarism in student work, but those tools are often unreliable, Broders said.
“Within the last week, I had a student whose professor used one of these checkers to do an assignment, and it came back as potentially AI-generated, so charges were brought against that student. ” Broaders said.
“The student came back and said, ‘No way, no way did I do that,’ and this professor actually retracted those charges.”
If a professor determines plagiarism has occurred, penalties can range from resubmitting the assignment to probation and even suspension.
Josh Lepowski, president of the Memorial University of Newfoundland Faculty Association, doesn’t think students are using AI in place of actual work.
“I haven’t really seen any research that actually supports that potential concern with hard evidence,” he said.
“For certain classes, assignments tend to be more fine-grained and more specific. The idea that you can simply copy the text of an assignment into ChatGPT and submit the finished text is pretty unlikely.”
Broders recommends that students stay away from AI altogether, at least until more reliable methods for properly using and verifying it are established.
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