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 was very surprised by the lack of essays and coursework in ds GCSEs, really nothing that wasn't done in school. I must have written at least 10 papers for English, history, geography, politics.

DD took GCSEs in 2016. Coursework was already being phased out then.

Its common and often I can tell immediately. It has a very particular and recognizable style. Of course, some students are probably using it in a more sophisticated way that is not obvious and I'm just not recognizing it. But when AI has done the heavy lifting on an essay I can tell right away.

I literally don't understand. Why are you paying 9k a year to do this? Why bother? Why even go to university?

No we don't.

The only time I use AI is to ask it to make the feedback I've drafted on an essay more polite if I'm in a bad mood.

My colleagues all despise it and, if anything, the problem is getting them to accept that it is now part of the workplace.

Most cheats are lazy and to some extent stupid.

AI can write your essay for you. But you need to rewrite it in order for it not to be detected.

The rewriting bit is the bit the lazy cheat is likely to fail on - they will likely just submit largely what the AI wrote. And get caught in the process.

AI can help you, but it can't do all your work for you.

Is this why students are asked to present their dissertations and answer questions about them?

Pull the other one

We really don't use it for course preparation and marking. My subject is very niche - it would just come up with something generic and boring if I asked it to prepare a lecture.

Do you work in HE?

Lots do and get caught, it can be why some are kicked of their courses.

Students definitely use it to write their papers but I don't know any lecturers who use it to grade papers.

I deal with academic Integrity issues at my university and it's mainly use of GENAI these days.

I'm surprised they are doing that. We're not allowed use AI detection tools because of the high level of false positives.

They're called AI hallucinations. It regularly makes up references which is one thing we consider to be proof of unauthorised use AI.

It’s really common. The trick isn’t to let it write everything for you, but to use it to improve what you’ve already written or to flesh out a rough draft. My son has used tools like perfectessaywritter.ai to polish his summatives and projects, mainly for structure and grammar. He’s now doing a postgrad qualification and still finds it helpful for assignments.

I’m a (very) mature student at the moment.

I use AI (Copilot) like google to find me sources and use Grammarly to sense check what I’ve written. At the end of the essay I have to state that I used it.

I’ve asked it to summarise for me and then used that as a starter of what I should include but that’s just at the end of the essay - it’s helpful in that way.

You could easily get AI to write the whole essay but we are heavily warned against this. If your friend can show the files she worked on it will have logged all the autosaves and show her progression and she should be fine… if she is innocent!

Yes. AI is only as good as the source material. Not in academia but in general I use AI to get more information on something and sometimes it just contradicts itself in the same paragraph. Also I have see it get words wrong because there has been a typo in one of the sources, which could just be someone's blog and definitely not a trustworthy source.

It definitely has it's place, but if there's no original thought then AI will just burn itself out or just become useless.

This.

Many students i know use it. Its also.used to write reports, emails, lots of things.

Fir university its cheating of course, so.if someone uses it they should have marks taken away.

We've been looking into this at work.

I submitted three essays handed in with the students work, all nameless

one I had written,
one I had used AI and handed it in with nothing more than a proof read (grammar/spelling/tense is sometimes wrong)
one where I had used AI, but took the time to rephrase most sentences, move the paragraphs, change some language, but I kept all the content the same.

Eight staff read them, all picked up the fully AI one, no one picked up on my amended AI one (and six of the 40 other papers also seemed to be fully AI)

I've said this before on here, but I ran a recent piece of my own written coursework through and AI checker recently, and it came out at 77% chance AI written. It's just how I write so I don't know what I can do about it...

I've had the same issue. I write for a living, business speak, so it's very hard for me to write any differently but it always gets flagged as AI.

I know someone at uni and they say they’re the only person in the class NOT using it.

It must be rife among students. Here in MN, I've read posts where people have accidentally left ChatGPT "would you like me to..." prompts at the end of their posts. If people are using it for relatively short, 100% voluntary forum posts, that says it all.

It's actually quite scary to wonder where AI could lead. I remember reading an AI-generated short story twenty years ago and it was complete gibberish - the words were English, but they made no sense. It's astonishing how much AI has evolved since then. What will it be like in another twenty years?

Not in my department we don't. We grind through reading hundreds of student essays because we want them to learn to think, and communicate their thinking.

And I can generally tell when a students cheats. AI is so bland and generalised, which is not answering the essay questions we set.

But, if students want to cheat, ultimately, they're just cheating themselves. At some point, their cheating will rebound on them - in the workplace, for example.

Most universities don't allow the use of AI detection software as it's too inaccurate. There are loads of clues that AI has been used but realistically, unless the student is lazy or stupid, we are relying on them confessing. The lazy or stupid students either don't proofread and leave the cues in or they don't check whether references are actually correct.

Tell me you know nothing about university without telling me you nothing about university.

And you're rude to boot.

Completely agree. I don't know anyone who uses genAI to do corrections. But yes, it's definitely useful for making some very frustrated feedback more polite 😁