Like just about every other professor in the world, it seems, I've been dealing with my share of students who've tried using ChatGPT to write their assignments for them. Not unsurprisingly, this problem showed up to the biggest degree in my winter-term course, which involves some tricky coding in a mildly obscure language. (The language is Prolog, so it's not that obscure but it does work in an extremely different way from the Java and Python that most computer science students are used to, and it can take a while to get your head around. I don't think I even had my head around it until the second time I taught the course.)

In this context, the students who are cheating are pretty obvious. My assignments usually involve asking them to demonstrate a particular technique or way of looking at a problem. Here's some code that does a breadth-first search through a problem space, for instance; here's our worked example from class of how we apply this code to Problem A; now modify the code so that it instead solves Problem B. The cheating students - the ones that I catch, at least - don't modify the code that way. They just plunk down some Problem B-solving code that has nothing to do, in its inner workings, with anything we saw in class. (If they're lucky, it's code that works, but it isn't always that, either.) Often they also make liberal use of external libraries that I kept telling them not to use.

What I keep thinking about, though, is not the techniques the cheaters use, but the excuses they give when I call them on it. Our school has a procedure for academic integrity cases; I know some profs who don't follow it because it's too much paperwork, but I follow it, and one of the nice things about this procedure is that it gives the students a chance to explain themselves and clear up any misunderstandings. Sometimes I get suspicious of a student but it turns out that they didn't cheat, or at least that I can't feel confident the balance of evidence says so. Sometimes - I think this is the most common case, actually - the student promptly apologizes and throws themselves on my mercy. Occasionally I get a non-responding student, or one who's like "meh" about the whole thing, or one who insists that they have no idea how they managed to write something that's an exact verbatim copy of the writing on this other website, they've never seen that website in their life, honest. Or I get the one student who shows up to an in-person meeting oozing politeness and concern but also pointing out that, well, they checked what the ombundsman's website says about academic integrity and they're pretty sure I didn't explicitly post a notice that the students couldn't collaborate on an individual assignment, and of course they understand now that that's what I meant, but they just want me to be prepared, in the case of an appeal...