AI Paranoia In Academia: Texas A&M Professor Fails Students Based On AI Detection

A professor at Texas A&M University flunked all his students after claiming that they all used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to write their final assignments. A screenshot of an email that the professor sent to their students in regard to the issue went viral on Reddit.

According to a report by Rolling Stone, the professor, Dr. Jared Mumm, sent an email to his students informing that everyone would be receiving an “X” in the course, because he used Chat GPT to test whether the students had used the AI to write their final assignment.

“I copy and paste your responses in [ChatGPT] and [it] will tell me if the program generated the content,” he wrote in the mail, and said that he had tested every assignment twice. Also, he said that he would give the students a new assignment to avoid failing grades, because some of the students would have graduated this year.

The problem is that ChatGPT isn’t made to detect whether a document was written by an AI or by itself. According to Rolling Stone, the AI has claimed to write passages from novels like Crime and Punishment by the Fyodor Dostoevsky

Texas A&M University sent a statement to Rolling Stone and said they were investigating the incident and that no student received a failing grade. “Dr. Jared Mumm, the class professor, is working individually with students regarding their last written assignments. Some students received a temporary grade of ‘X’ — which indicates ‘incomplete’ — to allow the professor and students time to determine whether AI was used to write their assignments and, if so, at what level.” The university wrote.

The use of AI in class is still a problem that every professor is facing, but paranoia will not solve it. It is important to say that, at the moment, there are no tools to identify if a paper was written by an AI, and professors and students need reliable information to address this problem.