It claimed to have written every essay he fed in - so he temporarily withheld a whole class’ final grades. Last month, a Texas professor incorrectly used ChatGPT in trying to assess whether students had completed an assignment using that software. Stivers is hardly alone in facing such an ordeal as students, teachers, and educational institutions grapple with the revolutionary power of artificially intelligent language bots that convincingly mimic human writing. She calls this a “huge waste of time” that could’ve been “spent doing homework and studying for midterms.” Because of this split focus, she says, her grades began to slide. She was expected to parse the school’s dense cheating policies and mount a formal defense of her work, with little institutional support and while facing the ordinary pressures of senior year.
“It was definitely very demotivating,” Stivers says of the accusation, which spiraled into a bureaucratic nightmare lasting more than two weeks as she sought to clear her name. Then she began gathering evidence that she’d written the brief herself.
Stivers was baffled and stressed but immediately afterward had to take a quiz for a different class. Already, her case had been forwarded to the university’s Office of Student Support and Judicial Affairs, which handles discipline for academic misconduct. Hours after she uploaded a paper for one of her classes in April (it was a brief summarizing a Supreme Court case), Stivers received an email from her professor indicating that a portion of it had been flagged by Turnitin as AI-written. “I was, like, freaking out,” she tells Rolling Stone.
That’s how Stivers wound up in trouble - even though she hadn’t cheated. But these days, school administrations are also on the lookout for assignments completed with generative AI. Educators rely on these services to evaluate text and flag any that appears to be copied from existing sources, and she never ran afoul of one.
Louise Stivers has always had her homework checked by software.Ī 21-year-old political science major from Santa Barbara about to graduate at University of California, Davis, with plans to attend law school, Stivers grew up in an age when students are expected to submit written assignments through anti- plagiarism tools such as Turnitin.
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