How common is it for students to use AI to complete their assignments?

[Darkling1]

Either at school, college and university.

I’m asking as a friend of mine is having her university assignment investigated for potential AI use. Friend swears that she didn’t use AI to complete this work.

Is it commonplace now?

I would say it's unlikely that people DON'T use it.

Very likely.

It’s commonplace and it’s super obvious

All these thickos using AI might pass assignments but they will fail exams and the workplace.

Students use AI to write their papers. Lecturers use AI to grade them. AI is everywhere in academia.

It's extremely common, especially on courses where assessment is mostly coursework based.

It's also quite easy to spot, but it's hard to prove if the student denies it.

It is a shame as the consequence is likely to be that universities move back to closed book exams, which is rubbish for the type of students who do better in continuous assessment and will end up under-performing. It's also a shame for the students using AI, who are de-skilling themselves by making their brains increasingly incapable of doing the task of synthesis, analysis, critical writing etc that they are paying 9k a year to learn.

I used it for some uni help and to help with work reports. I do not use it to write it but help with wording, clarity and formatting. Even then I proof read and change the phrasing to my style.

It is obvious if someone has used it. I can tell with things people write at work. it’s a great tool to help, check meaning and tone but not to do it.

I thought this too. I’m so glad AI didn’t exist when I was at university.

I have a friend who teaches at a university. They are now actively screening assignments for signs that they've been written 'substantially' using AI. They, quite rightly, expect students to draft and edit their own work and not have AI do it for them.

Is it through TurnItIn, or a different system?

I'm not sure - I can ask! I know the software screens the work (the irony!) but my friend, being a teacher for many years and an English lead, can usually spot AI-generated text a mile away.

Extremely common. The trick is not to get it to write for you, but to improve what you have written or flesh out the bones of something.

My son used it to improve his summatives and projects, mostly in regard to structure and grammar. He’s now doing a post grad qualification and uses it for assignments too.

I used AI for a work qualification last year that I simply did not have much time to devote to. I merely re-arranged a fair bit of what AI produced, and Turnitin did not detect any of it.

Well done you 👏 💪🎓

Different universities have different policies. I know many are actually okay with you using it, if it's used for certain things, some encourage it for proofreading, doing research, generating ideas, making your writing more coherent, giving you things that you may rework etc. They only penalise if you don't do anything yourself and it does everything or it's clear you haven't done any work to use the AI as a good tool. Others have banned it completely so it depends.

I will say just because someone's investigated for it, it doesn't mean they've used it. I had a friend who didn't, and was cleared, but was investigated quickly and quickly resolved. She just had good and detailed work, compared to many who did poor research.

in many ways Ai is no different than the essay mill companies that existed

I teach A Levels. It's becoming more common but VERY obvious to spot at my level. I know how specific students write and when they bang out something with oddly mature vocabulary I am more than a little suspicious. More importantly it doesn't achieve what they want it to, unless they are sophisticated users. The responses I have seen are full of waffle and tend to skirt around the question rather than directly demonstrating clear knowledge and understanding of the particular syllabus. I would imagine that a skilled user would make better use of it though.

However, at the moment, most students don't use it for assignments in my experience.

95%

And staff use it to prepare the course and mark assignments. Those kind of humanities courses are now pretty much pointless.

I teach at a university and recently did a training course about AI - basic message was that almost every student will be using it at varying levels and that plagiarism detection systems find it very hard to spot reliably (people’s instinct is actually better as PPs have said). So our university is actively planning to go back to paper exams, oral exams etc where possible (humanities).
NB I don’t use AI to mark or to construct courses as some PPs have suggested!

I’m currently at university and I use AI to help me understand concepts and produce questions to test myself and revision materials. My university is a super modern, tech literate university so they embrace AI to a certain extent, but they also have hard checks like in person exams or interviews on online exams, to check you understand what you’ve input and can explain it on the fly.

I think any student who uses AI for their degree assignments are doing themselves a disservice, cause no employer will see your degree as valuable if it’s that easy to secure. Plus the university materials are copyrighted, so if you’re inadvertently giving it to an AI model which synthesises it to their knowledge database, you can’t request it unlearns your course material. So this means you’re spending thousands on course material that you’ve just handed out to thousands of people who may query ChatGPT or whatever. Again, it cheapens your degree.

anyway, anyone who uses AI knows its limitations and how shit it can be - you can’t get a perfect score using AI alone. You need to have the baseline knowledge to correct any hallucinations or misunderstandings

My programme director has said the same. I'm taking a Masters; the issue seems to be with weaker undergrads. The Uni is taking a hard-line approach - thank God.

I've just finished a short college course. When my assignments were marked my tutor would tell me which questions were checked for AI. Of course none were found to have been written by AI. I know nothing about AI.

There is AI detection software that is used and it will scan the work to see how likely it is that AI was used to write it. Anything below a certain amount is accepted but above is generally considered not to be student written.