William Quarterman remembers the exact moment he found out he had been accused of using ai to cheat: between classes, when he logged into the student web portal at the University of California, Davis, to check his midterm grade in a class. of history.
The exam was a take-home exam, and Quarterman, a senior, was shocked to learn that not only had he been given a zero, but that his professor was accusing him of cheating by using ChatGPT to write his essay. The professor also informed him that she was referring Quarterman's case to the university's Office of Student Support and Judicial Affairs for academic dishonesty.
“Almost immediately I started crying,” Quarterman says. “I managed to get back to my apartment before suffering what I now recognize was a full-blown panic attack.”
Quarterman had never used ChatGPT and felt like his college career was derailing right before the finish line. Faced with the prospect of being negative, he felt like a Kafka character.
“It was a very traumatic experience because it's one of those few situations where you're sitting there and you have no control over the situation,” he says. “It's extremely stressful because you're a college student, you're supposed to have a lot of autonomy over your ability to finish college, and all of a sudden you're in a situation where none of that matters anymore.”
<h2 id="how-he-proved-his-innocence-against-an-ai-cheating-accusation-xa0″>How he proved his innocence against an ai cheating accusation
Before her tears dried, Quarterman called her parents: her father is a lawyer and her mother also has a background in law. His parents and other family members, including a sister who works in technology, immediately began advising him on ways he could prove his innocence.
Quarterman says her professor ran her essay response through an ai screening tool because she felt her response was too general. When the essay was rated positive, she proceeded to accuse him of cheating, never considering that the ai Detection Tool Might Have Recorded False Positivewhich can be quite common.
To counter these claims, Quarterman and his family did several things. First, because Quarterman had written the essay in Google Docs, he was able to use a feature that saves the editing history of each document to provide time-stamped evidence of how he created the article over the course of two or three hours.
Additionally, the family demonstrated how the ai detection tool their teacher used frequently incorrectly flagged famous works as ai-generated. This included Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream” speech and excerpts from the Book of Genesis.
Quarterman was eventually acquitted of the charge and graduated on time; However, he has since been contacted by several students who have had similar experiences with false accusations of ai use. He wonders what would have happened to him if he had not had the benefit of free legal advice from his family.
“If I were an international student without this support structure or a first-generation college student, I would be in a lot of trouble and I'm sure there are international students and first-generation students who are being unfairly accused of using ai. that they are being punished for something they didn't do,” he says.
He adds that this is all because universities can be so “interested in punishing students and making an example of quote-unquote 'bad apples' that they don't pay attention to the health of their own students.”
<h2 id="what-instructors-who-suspect-students-of-ai-use-can-do-instead-xa0″>What Teachers Who Suspect Students Using ai Can Do Instead
Quarterman believes that in five or six years, using ai to help write papers will be an accepted part of education, so he says instructors should worry less about punishing students in this transition period. However, he understands that many instructors will not agree with that. In those cases, Quarterman endorses the strategy of talking to the student, asking him or her to provide evidence that he or she is the author of the essay, or potentially asking him or her to rewrite it.
While this approach may still result in false accusations and stress for a student, it is much better than what you experienced. “I wish my teacher had done that. It would have been stressful, but not a tenth of what I went through,” he says. “I wish my teacher would ask me, 'Did you write this? Can you show me you wrote this? Or can you just try rewriting this one more time?'”
It doesn't matter exactly what the focus of this conversation is, Quarterman says, it's just important that teachers give students a chance to explain themselves. “Ten minutes with the student can save you a lot of time in the future,” he says.
Quarterman's story demonstrates that failing to give a student a presumption of innocence can cause tremendous mental anguish, that ai detectors can be wrong, and that there are consequences for students when instructors make false accusations.
Although Quarterman is still bitter about what happened, he hopes to use it in a positive way. The experience inspired him to apply for the San Francisco Police Department.
“I have had the experience of a judicial system that accuses me unfairly,” he says. “It is true that a university court system is much less stressful than the American court system and has much less impact. But I want to take that experience, apply it to police work and try to be the most accurate police officer possible.”