After being caught cheating in an introductory data science course, dozens of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign students sent emails of apology to two instructors. Surprisingly, however, the letters were written by artificial intelligence (AI), not by the students themselves.
Two instructors — Karle Flanagan and Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider, often jokingly called “the Data Science duo” by their students — said they noticed something unusual when they received a series of emails that began with the same sentence:
"Dear Professor Flanagan, I want to sincerely apologize…"
“At first I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, at least they’re apologizing,’” Professor Flanagan said. “But then I got a second and a third email – all of them saying ‘sincere apologies.’ That’s when I knew it was… not sincere anymore.”
During the class on October 17, two lecturers projected these identical emails onto a large screen and read them aloud to the class. The video quickly went viral on social media, making many people laugh and think.
“In the video, you can hear the students laughing,” said Professor Fagen-Ulmschneider. “They were laughing because they realized this could happen to them.”
Lecturers say they are not disciplining students but rather seeing the occasion as an opportunity to teach a lesson about academic integrity, as schools increasingly face AI interference in assignments and exams.
According to the New York Times , the University of Illinois has not yet commented on whether it will take action against the students involved. The school's student code mentions cheating and plagiarism, but has no specific regulations on the use of AI.
This course has about 1,200 students, mostly first years, divided into two classes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Attendance and participation account for 4% of the final grade.
To track student engagement, the two instructors developed an app called Data Science Clicker — students log in via phone or computer and answer multiple-choice questions in about 90 seconds when shown a QR code.
However, in early October, they discovered that many students were still able to answer questions despite being absent, prompting them to check their access history, IP addresses, and server logs.
“When we checked, we realized some students even went to Chicago on Friday but still ‘showed up’ for class,” said Mr. Fagen-Ulmschneider, 40, a lecturer in the Siebel School of Computer Science and Data Science.
After verifying, the two teachers sent warning emails to more than 100 students. “We take academic integrity very seriously, so we wanted to remind them in advance,” said Ms. Flanagan, 36, a lecturer in the Department of Statistics.
A student who took the course, Alex Von Holten, 20, said he wasn’t surprised to hear that some people “slept through” the class. “It’s a basic class, and it’s taught in a large lecture hall format, so it’s easy to get distracted. It’s actually very difficult not to get an A,” he said.
Former student Vinayak Bagdi, 21, who took the class his freshman year, said the actions of some students were regrettable. “You don’t show up to class, and then you let AI write your apology email for you—what else is there to say? Of all the subjects you can take in school, why skip this one, when the teacher really wants to help you understand the subject?” he said.
Source: https://vietnamnet.vn/bi-giao-su-phat-hien-gian-lan-hang-chuc-sinh-vien-nho-ai-viet-thu-xin-loi-2457984.html
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