Officials at Texas A&M University-Commerce are investigating after an agriculture professor accused his students of using artificial intelligence on their final written assignments. According to a post on Reddit, Jared Mumm, an agricultural sciences and natural resources instructor at the school, sent an email to his class that they would all be receiving an incomplete grade as he had asked ChatGPT (an AI chatbot) to see if it had generated any of the responses on their final assignments, and it verified that it had.
Attempts were made to contact Mumm by phone, email, and LinkedIn, but were unsuccessful. The university said no students failed the class or were barred from graduation, despite claims made on the Reddit post, although some received a temporary incomplete so the assignment could be investigated or reworked with professor. After the email, some students were exonerated, and their grades were released. It was not confirmed whether any students used ChatGPT on their final assignments.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the best known large language model, which is a machine learning application trained on terabytes of data to create outputs that look like human writing. ChatGPT is released as an app in the United States, the first of its kind. When asked if it had generated paragraphs written by humans, the chatbot claims responsibility.
Foxes reported that it cannot be determined if a response was initially generated by ChatGP. People on Reddit tested it, and the results were similar. The university is exploring policies for AI technology use or misuse, and resources are being developed to manage the intersection of it in education. It is part of the rapidly altering environment in relation to AI technology in the classroom.
Overall, Texas A&M University – Commerce is looking into the claim that ChatGPT was used, as they strive to provide the best education to their students. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the first of its kind, using AI trained on colossal amounts of data to produce written passages that appear to be authored by human writers. This activity is being addressed severely as the university is creating policies and resources to manage AI’s presence in the classroom.
