A NUMBER OF seniors at Texas A&M UniversityCommerce who already walked the stage at graduation this year have been temporarily denied their diplomas after a professor ineptly used AI software to assess their final assignments, the partner of a student in his class known as DearKick on Reddit claims to Rolling Stone.
Dr. Jared Mumm, a campus rodeo instructor who also teaches agricultural classes, sent an email on Monday to a group of students informing them that he had submitted grades for their last three essay assignments of the semester. Everyone would be receiving an X in the course, Mumm explained, because he had used Chat GTP (the OpenAI chatbot is actually called ChatGPT) to test whether theyd used the software to write the papers and the bot claimed to have authored every single one.
I copy and paste your responses in [ChatGPT] and [it] will tell me if the program generated the content, he wrote, saying he had tested each paper twice. He offered the class a makeup assignment to avoid the failing grade which could otherwise, in theory, threaten their graduation status.
Theres just one problem: ChatGPT doesnt work that way. The bot isnt made to detect material composed by AI or even material produced by itself and is known to sometimes emit damaging misinformation. With very little prodding, ChatGPT will even claim to have written passages from famous novels such as Crime and Punishment. Educators can choose among a wide variety of effective AI and plagiarism detection tools to assess whether students have completed assignments themselves, including Winston AI and Content at Scale; ChatGPT is not among them. And OpenAIs own tool for determining whether a text was written by a bot has been judged not very accurate by a digital marketing agency that recommends tech resources to businesses.
But all that would apparently be news to Mumm, who appeared so out of his depth as to incorrectly name the software he was misusing. Students claim they supplied him with proof they hadnt used ChatGPT exonerating timestamps on the Google Documents they used to complete the homework but that he initially ignored this, commenting in the schools grading software system, I dont grade AI bullshit. (Mumm did not return Rolling Stones request for comment.)
Mumms email was shared on Reddit by a user with the handle DearKick, who identified himself as the fianc of one of the students to receive a failing grade for submitting supposedly AI-generated essays. He claims to Rolling Stone that his partner had never heard of ChatGPT herself and was baffled by the accusation, noting that she feels even worse considering its something she knows nothing about. She immediately reached out to the dean and CCd the president of the university, DearKick alleges, but did not immediately receive assistance and went to plead her case with administrators in person on Tuesday. DearKick adds that Mumm allegedly flunked several whole classes in similar fashion rather than question the validity of his methods for detecting cheaters.
In an amusing wrinkle, Mumms claims appear to be undercut by a simple experiment using ChatGPT. On Tuesday, redditor Delicious_Village112 found an abstract of Mumms doctoral dissertation on pig farming and submitted a section of that paper to the bot, asking if it might have written the paragraph. Yes, the passage you shared could indeed have been generated by a language model like ChatGPT, given the right prompt, the program answered. The text contains several characteristics that are consistent with AI-generated content. At the request of other redditors, Delicious_Village112 also submitted Mumms email to students about their presumed AI deception, asking the same question. Yes, I wrote the content youve shared, ChatGPT replied. Yet the bot also clarified: If someone used my abilities to help draft an email, I wouldnt have a record of it.
DearKick tells Rolling Stone that their fiances meeting on Tuesday with the universitys Dean of Agricultural Science should clear things up, I hope, and speculates that Mumm had little familiarity with chatbots before attempting to run student papers through one. In an update to his original post, he revealed that while at least one student has already been exonerated through Google Docs timestamps and received an apology from Mumm, another two had admitted to using ChatGPT earlier in the semester, which no doubt greatly complicates the situation for those who did not.
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