This article first appeared at UNC Media Hub and is being republished with permission.
Even if it’s perfectly acceptable to use AI for certain tasks like checking grammar, generating ideas, or writing outlines, students might instead use it to replace their work entirely as time runs out to submit an assignment. In many universities, this constitutes cheating.
“I think it's nice to use it as a builder, but then whatever I submit, it's my own work. And I think that's the biggest thing in our policy for academic dishonesty, they just mention submitting your own work,” says Aaron Lash Jr., associate dean of students at Duke University. “But I think a lot of students you know can get confused with copying and pasting something generated from ChatGPT, and then getting flagged.”
In just a few years, AI has developed rapidly. Not only do North Carolina universities have to figure out how to incorporate AI into the classroom, but they also must decide where it crosses the line into cheating. And when it does, faculty and students alike have to unpack an even bigger question: what do they do then?
AI Policies: Where to find them
On the first day of class, sometimes students have to adjust to a few different AI policies. At Duke, professors are encouraged to write and publicize their AI policies specific to their courses, Lash says.
If there was no AI policy, that would be confusing for the student, he says.
When he serves on the Duke University Student Conduct Board, Runda Li doesn’t hear too many people say they are confused about AI policies. But in class, he’s overheard other students wonder whether they should follow the broader university guidelines on AI or those of their professors. But they can –and should– always ask, he says. And if they were to come to him for advice, either as the vice president of the Duke Honor Council or as an advisor for the student conduct board, he’d recommend the same thing.
How often are they broken?
Sometimes, students do use AI in an unauthorized way. But AI isn’t necessarily making that problem worse. Since its rapid development over the past few years, Lash has seen more cases of academic dishonesty related to AI, but not more so than other forms of cheating.
“And then, of course, we do get some AI violations, but it's not, nowhere near as much as the typical receiving, giving unauthorized aid,” he says. “Hey, you have a lab report. You know you could work with your partner, but you have to submit your own work. You don't submit your own work, right? So it’s those things.”
Chip Phillips, assistant dean of students at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, tells a similar story. Roughly 40% of the cheating cases reported to the Office of the Dean of Students involve AI, he estimates, although the number of reported cases involving cheating at all has remained stable in recent years.
Even if AI may not be making students cheat more, it may still change the way professors give assessments. It might be better for professors to assess students in class, especially as they see AI-related cheating in take-home assignments, Phillips says.
“Instead of sending you home with that essay, we take a class period, and you come in and here's the topic, “Go!”, right?” Phillips says. “I know, you know, your handwriting might be bad, and you're gonna make grammar mistakes, that's fine, but this is how I want to assess your knowledge of the topic.”
The Conduct Process: What can happen?
When students are accused of academic dishonesty, there are several ways this can be resolved, such as faculty-student resolutions or administrative hearings.
However, sometimes these cases must be resolved in front of a panel in a conduct board hearing.
Cases can reach a hearing for several reasons. A case might be complex, or a student might request that resolution option, Lash and Phillips say.
“It's not court, and philosophically, it's not meant to be punitive,” Phillips says. “It’s really meant to be educational.”
But outcomes at these hearings can affect students, sometimes via their grades or in more severe cases, their academic records.
Submitting Evidence
After an assignment has been turned in, a faculty member might look at it, and feel that something is off. Maybe on a student’s previous assignment, there were a handful of spelling and grammar mistakes but then on this one, the writing is flawless. Or maybe the writing has a lot of words that the student doesn’t normally use. Sometimes, there can even be sources cited in the paper that just don’t exist.
They’ll usually talk to the student first, Phillips says. They might pull them aside after class and ask where they got their sources from or if they can talk through parts of their essay.
“Nobody wants to falsely accuse the student of something, I don't think, and so they're usually pretty sure before they put it up to this, to our office, you know,” he says.
But if they still don’t feel like the student wrote their assignment, they might run the assignment through an AI platform or detector to check for similarity. Or, they could report them to their respective student conduct office directly.
AI detectors are not the only evidence used by professors at North Carolina universities, but they are a common one. If a student uses AI generators like ChatGPT or Copilot to improve their grammar and spelling, it’s not always clear whether AI detectors are detecting the edits or a section that’s been entirely written by AI, says Vanessa Hansmann, director of case management for the UNC Chapel Hill Office of Student Legal Counsel.
This makes it harder for students to defend themselves, especially because they only need to be found more likely responsible than not, she says.
Among many other universities, Duke, UNC Wilmington, and as of 2024, UNC Chapel Hill, use a preponderance of evidence standard to determine responsibility. Preponderance means “more likely than not”, and can be understood as more than 50% chance a student did it, Hansmann says. This standard is also commonly used in civil court, according to North Carolina general statutes published by the North Carolina General Assembly.
The reliability and accuracy of AI detectors has recently undergone much scrutiny. Researchers have found evidence of both systemic false positives, according to a 2023 study from Patterns, as well as false negatives, according to a 2023 study from the International Journal of Educational Integrity.
“Out of curiosity, I’ve put a paper I've written, like, entirely myself into like, GPTZero, and it’ll be like, ‘Yeah, this is AI,’” Hansmann says. “So that's the thing. It's just really unreliable. And I think that's why we see a lot of issues with AI cases, because it's, yeah, you can't tell either way.”
But that’s also why during the hearing process, both Lash and Phillips say that board members don’t rely on AI detection software alone. Instead, they spend a lot of time trying to understand and establish the circumstances around the alleged violation.
The Hearing
“You know, I ask questions,” Lash says. “So again, you know, sometimes we try to get a written statement from the student. ‘Hey, if you didn't do this, explain how you got your work, X, Y and Z.’ I'll get that statement. I'll ask a professor, ‘Hey, this is what I received. Do you have a follow-up on that?’”
When the hearing begins, both parties get to share their side of what happened. And while students can request advisors to guide them through the process of the hearing at the three universities, they cannot have somebody speak for or represent them. There is a difference between knowing your options and the relevant information you should mention, versus knowing the most strategic information you should mention and how you should say it, Hansmann says.
And for her, as well as the Office of Student Legal Counsel, that difference is big.
“That's why I think in our legal system, right, you are always, you have the right to an attorney, even if you can't afford one, because they know the ins and outs of the policy so well,” she says.
After UNC Chapel Hill's conduct system shifted from the student-run honor system to a new system with new advisors and processes, several students noticed that their peers were feeling disconnected from the process, including the administration of the upcoming undergraduate student body president, says Kendall Esque, chief legal officer for the UNC Office of Student Legal Counsel and Noa Roxborough, executive director of the UNC Student Government Student Advocacy Conduct Task Force.
Esque and Roxborough led the process to incorporate the student organization Student Advocacy Network, which provided more specialized assistance to students going through the academic hearing process, into the undergraduate student government under the Office of Student Legal Counsel. The goal was to better support this resource helping students to adapt to this change in the conduct process. But it was also just as important to help students access another, more robust kind of support.
“If you going in, like, you don't understand how these decisions are made, what's relevant, what to bring up, obviously you're at disadvantage because you don't necessarily have the understanding of the information that's relevant to your case, things that could really like, turn it in the other direction,” Hansmann says.
To her knowledge, no student that’s been given the option to take the Office of Student Legal Counsel’s help has declined it.
A student might practice going through the hearing with the office. They’d listen to a script of the hearing, and pretend like they’re giving a statement to the hearing chair. At the end, the hearing chair, played by a member of the Office of Student Legal Counsel, would give the student feedback.
They’d be told what evidence is the most relevant to defend themselves. A member of the office would know what questions to ask in the first place to get this information. Were you stressed? Did you stay up too late studying? After they tell their story, the minor details that make up their case would come to light.
Strategizing with a student to defend themselves like this is not explicitly prohibited for a student advisor to do at UNC Chapel Hill, but it’s not a part of the job description. Student and faculty advisors at Duke and UNC Wilmington say the same thing: this type of help would be an overstep.
“And so if the student asked me, like, ‘Do you have any strategies for, like, ways to get out of this?’ Um, I probably am not going to, like, answer that directly,” Phillips says. Advisors are able to sit with students during hearings, and they can nudge students in the right direction. “But I might push them to think through what some strategies might be so they think for themselves.”
Moving forward
After the student presents their side of the story and the faculty member presents theirs, the conduct boards privately determine the outcome – not of guilt, but of responsibility.
“And again, the goal is to identify the misconduct, the behaviors,” Lash says. “I tell students all the time, just because you have a bad moment doesn't make you a bad person.”
Across the universities, there’s a wide variety of outcomes from academic dishonesty resolutions. On the faculty side, Lash and Phillips say professors might have to rethink how they assess students.
On the student side, one of the biggest concerns students report is whether an outcome – from a formal disciplinary hearing or not – will appear on their transcript, they say.
When students come to them with these fears, Lash and Phillips emphasize that yes, they made a mistake, but one that they can learn from.
“They're just worried, like they think it's gonna, like, ruin their life, kind of thing,” Phillips says. “And it's really not.”
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