No Stupid Questions

Have you tried suing your school?

Can you feed in the text for all your assignments from your instructors and file complaints with the administration for any above 0%?

higher than 0% can cause lost grades.

I still lose marks.

Is this actual policy or are you just trying to make sure your AI usage can't be detected?

Because there is no reliable way to detect AI usage except for obvious styling, prompt traps, and just matching your comprehension with the material (grades on assignments vs closed notes test).

I've never heard of any university using such a system and would bring this up to administration with other students if they ever used such an unreliable grading method.

Pay for the highest tier plan of Claude and ask it to make it look more like a human wrote it.

Real answer: Your university is being ridiculous. They should be using a digital proctoring service while you guys do your papers if they're that serious about it. Detectors will never work. We aren't allowed to make flat accusations of AI use, but a high result would make us look at the paper and see if there were any other irregularities or talk to the student to make sure that can explain the paper. It's not a free chance to just toss the paper into a cheating bin.

Video record you writing your papers by hand with a clear view of your computer screen. Turn in hand written paper.

Slop detectors might as well be random number generators, it will never give you 0% because it's slop in and of itself.

Sounds like someone should file a lawsuit against the school for using ai ai detectors that don't work right.

At the least there should be an appeals process, anonymously, where the decision goes to a jury of faculty or something if not settled otherwise.

No. There is nothing you can do. AI detection is bullshit and there is no way to game it to reduce how much it determines you to be an AI. Your school is punishing you for it existing, and thus they remove the punishment for those using it.

My experience is the opposite. Even for a work that was 100% obviously written by AI, an AI detector only gave me 30% probability. That specific work was written with a PhD level and had bogus sources, one litteraly having copilot in the name. Coming from a 19 years old first year college student.... On every work I presented, the AI evaluated the probability very low while for me (I know the students, I've spent 15 weeks with them) l, they obviously didn't wrote the papers. When I pointed to the model that I was sceptical, it suddenly change the cheating probability to a much higher score. So basically it just tolds you what you want to hear. The college told us they wont consider cheating unless we have proof so we just end up giving good grades to everyone. Two scenarios here, either about 70% of students use some sort of AI to write these days, or we have the smartest generation ever in front of us, with 19 years old kids having the level of their teacher aftef a year in College. University and College administration want to give diplomas, the students want to graduate, and the teachers are now just a tool to get this done.

Universities like Hardvard recently adopted internal rules preventing a class from having more than 40% A or A+ in the final result, because it was getting absurd, with some classes having 80% of the students with an A. I'm seriously considering leaving college teaching because I can't understand what's happening.

i wonder if it eventually comes to having to resort to legal action because of this. Those detectors are unreliable yet you can be penalized based on what they spew. And lost grades is lasting consequence.

You do really need to make a stand on this. Personally, I would offer a test or demonstration where you write a paper in a place where you can be assured to not be using an AI, and have them check the false-positive rate to show the vendor they have is bad. Short of that, you're really talking about pushback on an administration that clearly has only mediocre ideas, and is willing to let students suffer the brunt of their bad decision-making until you make it a problem for them.

Students should have a way to seek real recourse about this. Use it now and use it early to establish a record of receiving false positives, Otherwise you risk some professor later really causing problems with a 5% false positive rate and it being a huge problem for you.

You could use something that automatically keeps track of revision history, like Google Docs. If your writing is flagged by their AI detectors, show them the full history.

years ago, we were told to make our writing formal and dry. now, the best way to make sure it doesn't get flagged as false positives is tone and personality of your writing. an AI will never have a joke in a footnote, actual papers sometimes do.

As someone who teaches CS and grades assignments, the last few years have been really rough. Academic dishonesty has skyrocketed with models becoming smarter and students becoming more dependent on them. Any assignment that's above average will make me suspicious, and when it appears to be 100% AI generated, the feeling that I spend more time grading than the student spent working on it is awful. Even when I'm almost sure a work is AI generated, unless there are some dumb leftovers such as "As an AI assistant [...]", I can never be 100% sure. This causes me a lot of headaches because the only thing worse than rewarding dishonesty would be not appropriately rewarding an outstanding assignment.

As much as I'd love to have à software tell me with 100% certainty which parts (if any) of an assignment are AI written, AI detectors are all snake oil, no exception. They exploit teachers' helplessness to make false promises that we really want to believe in.

Moreover, I don't think fully banning AI use is a sensible thing to do. LLMs are a thing, whether we like them or not, and using them in a sensible way is a useful skill to learn. There's one big issue though : on one hand, assignments are made so that the problems students have to solve all have well-known solutions. This is required to make sure the assignment is doable in the first place, and that teachers will be able to help. On the other hand, LLMs are disproportionately good at classic assignment problems since there are so many published solutions online (which then end up in training datasets). Moreover, assignements are usually made to guide students through a larger problem by breaking it down into smaller problems, which is basically the perfect prompt for a LLM. This means students can get away with the laziest uses of LLMs (which usually won't work with real world problems). In the worst cases, the only "skill" some students learn is to throw a PDF at whatever AI they paid for, ask it to solve the assignment, and copy paste the output without thoroughly reading it first.

Teachers clearly need to adapt. There will always be a few students who fail to learn in every class, but when so many students don't learn, it's the teacher who is failing to teach.

Get a video camera to film you while you write and screen record what you do on your laptop. That way you have proof that you didn't use models. And I'm only half joking.

As much as I loathe to suggest this: maybe you should try to prompt some models on topics you write on. Just to see what it spits out so you can avoid sounding alike. Same for visuals it would come up with.

Or you could see if some industrious fellow student has found a copy of the software the faculty use to do a trial run. It may have fallen off a truck somewhere. Happens all the time! Just make sure you protect yourself.

I guess you could make a document history. Make a copy for each day you work on that document. Idk if they are going to accept it as proof though..

Write it by hand. Hand it over in person.

AI tends to write correct English, so you could try adding typos, grammatical mistakes, incorrect punctuation, wrong capitalization, etc. /joke

...in conclusion: fuck China, Donald Trump raped children and SpaceX is overvalued.