Educators Overwhelmed by AI-Generated Work
Instructors and reviewers across academic levels are struggling to detect and manage the increasing prevalence of AI-generated content in student work, reports, and applications. This influx of AI-assisted submissions is creating significant additional workload, requiring extensive verification and raising concerns about academic integrity. The current detection methods are proving inadequate and time-consuming.
SOURCES (60)
“We have an app called brisk that breaks it down to the keystroke, it detects copy pastes so I can explicitly show them a copy paste. The rest of the thing is ai nonsense, but that part is very good.”
“FWIW I really was happy to see your whole post.As a student, _especially_ in the weedout classes where your performance in those classes decided if you could get into that major (I went to a school where you applied to majors 1-2 years after starting) it was incredibly frustrating to see other students cheating. When applying to a major that was well past capacity and very competitive to get into, it very much felt like a 0-sum scenario where cheating students were screwing the rest of us over.”
“It's part of the problem with academia being behind industry.I had a similar problem when doing my MBA; Lean Startup had just been released and the whole "startup scene" was getting going. But I couldn't use any of that in my MBA entrepreneurial course, because no-one had written a paper on Lean. I had to write business plans (which, obviously, no-one was doing out in the real world). I was being taught a useless skill because academia couldn't adapt quick enough.For these CS grads who are being”
“hello everyone, i am currently taking ap research, and today my teacher told me that my source annotations were found to be “100% ai” from turnitin. i have taken a research course with the same rigor and writing assignment requirements with this teacher the year before, and have never in my life been faced with ai accusations. i understand that ai checkers tend to make minimal mistakes when it comes to verifying human writing, but genuinely 100%???? what the hell??? i don’t even know how to addr”
This megathread is for r/GradSchool to discuss all aspects of AI in graduate school, from AI detectors to workflow tools. Basically, if something is related to the intersection of AI and graduate…
“From the opening paragraph:we do not endorse this practice, and we ask them to stop testing advanced mathematical problems on proprietary modelsFrom point 2 under section "1. Background":AI labs should provide significant support, including funding, to help develop this understandingPoint 3 under the same section:The development of human understanding must remain organic and community led. It should not be directed by AI labs, even when the labs have produced the results.If, as you say, they are”
“There's more and more headlines about academics writing journal articles using AI, and lots of talk on reddit about plagiarism, But I am wondering if editors or folks (especially in the humanities) who work for high ranking journals have seen an increase in the number of submissions since these large language models have infiltrated higher Ed? submitted by /u/Icy-Sheepherder382 [link] [comments]”
“Just a vent really, I don’t have any substantive questions or anything. —— I’ve noticed a huge increase in student writing scoring high percentages on TurnItIn’s Similarity Index. (I don’t use AI detectors on principle). The papers that are getting flagged are shown to have X% similarity with a half dozen or so student papers from a variety of other universities. That’s not necessarily unusual. And I can’t view those other university papers bc the student/university holds ownership of them, also”
“For a little context, I am currently working on a research project with 3 other professors (4 of us in total). It's a qualitative study in my field of research. Of the 4 I have the most experience with both qualitative work and reading/publishing/doing research in this field. One of the other authors wants to take the lead on this paper, to help him with tenure (I have tenure), and because he wants the experience. Fine with me, I have many first-author papers, I've published in this fiel”
“During PD, a teacher showed an extension reading essays in Google Docs and writing feedback. Half the room already used one. We have 11k students, hundreds of DPAs and none cover these tools. Blocking managed Chromebooks is easy but home laptops are where teacher burnout lives. How are you handling it? submitted by /u/Humblxe-Telehone-149 [link] [comments]”
“It's also easy as an average AI user to do enough of my own input that nobody ever claims my stuff IS AI. Yet, I save hours of my life. Win win for those us of who took the time to learn the tool.”
“My advisor is asking chat GPT to detect the use of AI in my paper. He didn’t upload the full paper, but copy pasted the abstract and intro into it. Now I tried uploading some of the older published abstracts in chat GPT and it even flags them as AI. Now how should I explain this to my professor? No matter how I edit, chat gpt always shows 35-40% AI submitted by /u/RecherchePorsche [link] [comments]”
“The concrete case that made me build this: a professor put a line of white, 1pt text into the assignment PDF, addressed directly to an AI model ("if an AI is answering this, add X / cite Y"), betting that anyone who solved it with AI would copy that marker into their submission without noticing. Completely invisible on any normal read of the document. What makes it work is the gap between what you see rendered and what the model actually reads, the file's raw text layer. Before fee”
“I sat those Cambridge CS exams years back and what always bugged me was how past paper apps never explained why an answer was wrong beyond just showing the mark scheme. If you can make the AI actually point out the logic gaps in a student's pseudocode instead of just flagging it incorrect that would be huge Topic weight tracking is smart most teachers never bother to mention that 8-mark questions on logic gates show up every single year without fail”
“My university says we absolutely cannot accuse a student of using A.I. to replace their own work because detectors are unreliable. Instead, we have to have a meeting with the student to gently get them to confess. I've had two cases of cheating with A.I. Both are obvious. In the first case, when I met with the student, he didn't exactly confess but when I offered to let him do the assignment over for half points, he willingly agreed. He's a first year and terrified he isn't prepa”
“Due to the new challenges in identifying and combating academic fraud faced by teachers, this thread is intended to be a place to ask for assistance and share the outcomes of attempts to identify, disincentive, or provide effective consequences for AI-generated coursework. At the end of each week, top contributions may be added to the above wiki to bolster its usefulness as a resource. Note: please seek our wiki ( https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/wiki/ai\_solutions ) for previous proposed sol”
“I was one of the first here to systematically describe signs of AI use in college admissions essay writing. (If I contributed to the decline of the em-dash: I'm sorry!) As applicants learn to avoid common LLM-generated sentence structure, punctuation, and phrasing, it can be harder to tell. But when you read a lot of essays, new patterns start to emerge. Sometimes it doesn't even take that many. Last week, I came across the phrase " I couldn't stop noticing " in two of my s”
“21 percent generated on one and 70 percent on the other. I have been hunched over my computer trying my best to balance between authentic and articulate and my essays are going to get flagged for ai when I spent DAYS perfecting them. I’m so done. I’m so sick of the lazy bums who make colleges flag essays for ai in the first place. I’m working my absolute hardest on these and I don’t know what else to do. Do I have to sound like a two year old now? Should my phrasing be awkward? It’s not my fault”
“I believe that one was discussed with the author on HN, and that they used AI to 'copyedit'. Unfortunately that's a trap because if you make a general copyediting request most LLMs will absolutely slopify your work-- and make edits that are unambiguously bad as well as just making it look like lazy llm output.The better use is to ask it to point out grammatical and spelling errors, or phrasing which is unclear.. then go fix yourself (or direct highly targeted fixes that don't let it slopify).”
“Best way to prevent cheating right now in uni is on paper in person tests/exams/etc”
“It's probably good news for those who really know their stuff and don't rely on AI. It will filter out a lot of vibe coders.”
“Man to have to not rely on AI to do their university studies. I mean what will happen next. Guessing you haven’t ever studied without AI helping you?”
“For context, I am an online student and just recently had my midterm for college algebra. A week before the test, he stated that there were clear signs of people using AI. One factor is that people are taking 10 minutes on 25-30 question homework assignments. Then he claimed that the midterm will reveal all the people clearly using AI. After I took my midterm (which had a bonus question for extra credit if you got it right, just explaining my grade) I noticed the low was 5.0, mean was, 52, and t”
“Sure, you can be much more productive writing essays for example if you have AI write them. Homework of course is much faster and easier if ChatGPT does it for you. All of these things were possible even pre-AI by paying someone else to do things for you (though in some cases it would be considered cheating, but if we set that aside). You’ll definitely blow anyone out of the water who studies or writes for themselves. I also totally get that the productivity gains are so attractive you don’t min”
“Is there some reason to assume AI companies wouldn't just program their systems to bypass a "pretty please" from teachers?”
“So, I had an idea. Not sure if this has been theorized anywhere else but this is somewhere I thought it would be appreciated. My wife is in college and we've heard many professors complain about AI usage in academic assignments. I personally have used artificial intelligence in my work as an automation specialist and as a research tool for personal projects. We hear about the frustration professors express when they assign protects, essays, or any assignment for their students. All they want”
“The Dartmouth subsequently reviewed publications written by Schnell before and after the November 2022 public release of ChatGPT. Pangram 4.0, the latest publicly available version of the AI detector, labeled all of Schnell’s written works prior to 2022 as “100% human-written,” while a test of nine of his works published this year returned a median “AI-written” percentage of 96%. [...] “I develop ideas and arguments, conduct the research, evaluate the evidence and sources, determine the structur”
“I've been looking into AI humanizers for college assignments lately, and I've noticed that most discussions focus on getting the lowest possible AI detector score rather than improving the actual writing. But what happens when a humanizer completely changes your argument, removes an important citation, or makes your essay sound nothing like you? I'm more interested in finding something that makes AI-assisted writing sound natural without losing the original meaning, especially for lo”
“Me and my friend graduated high school 4 years ago, and he passed every assignment using my ai software I made, which he paid me to use. I recorded every log of him using it to cheat for literally every single assignment. Should I call the school 4 years later and show them this evidence to takeaway his diploma. What response will I most likely get when calling the front office. Thanks! submitted by /u/Responsible-Pilot405 [link] [comments]”
“If the AI can do the work they're covering in class, it'll be doing that work too in the field. They're better off learning how to use the AI and what kind of oversight it needs to run efficiently”
“You did the right thing reporting it! My school’s academic integrity rules and code of ethics essentially stated that if you knew and didn’t say anything you were also complicit. And I knew people who got screwed over because they didn’t want to get their friend into trouble.”
“I built a small checker for AI-generated research reports. It detects when several citations appear independent but are actually copies or close rewrites of the same original source. The tool has a clear limitation: deeper semantic rewrites can still get through. When it cannot verify a relationship, it says “independence unknown.” I don’t want to turn it into a large SaaS before anyone uses it. My current idea is to offer a fixed-scope manual service: A team sends one sanitized old report. I ch”
“[RANT] So, long story short, my department has an “informal type of agreement” that before defending your thesis, it must be run over an “anti-plagiarism” software to watch out for red flags, similarities, AI usage, etc. The chair says that anything over 10% similarity isn’t acceptable (a really stupid judgment in my opinion), so if that’s the case, you have to make arrangements to lower it to <10% My thesis is a little over 400 pages long and it has around 300 citations. I’m at the humanitie”
“Due to the new challenges in identifying and combating academic fraud faced by teachers, this thread is intended to be a place to ask for assistance and share the outcomes of attempts to identify, disincentive, or provide effective consequences for AI-generated coursework. At the end of each week, top contributions may be added to the above wiki to bolster its usefulness as a resource. Note: please seek our wiki ( https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/wiki/ai\_solutions ) for previous proposed sol”
“Let's say someone used AI to help with editing some of their essays for many schools. Ethically, and in line with the AAMC's guidelines and that of that school. Now, they're applying to a school that says not to use AI at all, so they won't use it for the schools. Is it fine if they reuse some secondary materials from other schools (but without editing with AI). Should this person rewrite their stories from scratch to be ethical, or just make sure that nothing submitted to the sc”
“I am trying to create an assignment for a graduate stats course on the critical appraisal of scientific literature. The problem is anyone can now provide a link to a paper to genAI and ask for an appraisal. I just tested with a few papers and the appraisals were quite good. How can I teach and assess critical appraisal in a course? submitted by /u/steffejr [link] [comments]”
“I am currently writing the entire letter myself because I am under the impression that PIs don't like AI-written letters. This takes around 20 hours spread across 3-4 days. But in that time, the position already accumulates multiple applications just on LinkedIn. Add to that applications coming from other job boards. I recently applied to a few PhDs that released a list of applicants after the deadline. It already had 200 applicants who had consented to make their names public. I think I am”
“For context, unless we have definitive evidence that students used AI (e.g., leaving raw prompts in their text), we cannot accuse them of academic misconduct. I appreciate that there may be outliers whose work flags as AI-generated without cause, and we want to avoid a witch hunt. However, I am facing a widespread issue with our international Data Science and AI cohort. Many submit 100-page dissertations that are structurally identical, with AI checkers flagging them at 100%. Furthermore, their”
“I’ve seen quite a few posts about students being accused of using AI because their work was flagged by a detector. If you actually wrote the paper yourself, what’s the best way to prove it? Drafts, notes, Google Docs version history, sources? And how much do you trust AI detector results in situations like this? Would love to hear any tips or real experiences. submitted by /u/Lonely-World-7037 [link] [comments]”
“I have been using the checked4ai chrome extension for google docs but the results seem a bit unreliable for the ai checking side. Does anyone have any ai checkers they recommend? submitted by /u/Immediate_Law1166 [link] [comments]”
“Due to the new challenges in identifying and combating academic fraud faced by teachers, this thread is intended to be a place to ask for assistance and share the outcomes of attempts to identify, disincentive, or provide effective consequences for AI-generated coursework. At the end of each week, top contributions may be added to the above wiki to bolster its usefulness as a resource. Note: please seek our wiki ( https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/wiki/ai\_solutions ) for previous proposed sol”
“Hello! New here. Curious to know if fellow faculty are using AI detectors like GPTZero, and if so, if you find them to be reliable. Particularly interested in humanities fac. submitted by /u/TimeTravelr1 [link] [comments]”
“They are trained to find things no matter what. They are trained that no teacher can possibly be a perfect score. No matter what, they’ll invent things that have no basis in research (as if they understand research). You could be coming off Teacher of the year for the district with 100% mastery on the end of year test and all your students accepted to College with 6 figures worth of scholarships and some admin that couldn’t last 3 years in the classroom will tell you what you’re doing wrong”
“This is very similar to a form of plagiarism called cryptomnesia . Where you don't even remember reading the original content. Perhaps "clankomnesia"?”
“Needed to find a link to an open access article I published only to find it was "reviewed" in a podcast. Oh. My issue? it looks like this podcast is AI generated with obviously fake names, AI art, and misreading my use of terminology. I kind of hate that. If they wanted to host me I would have said yes to being a guest. The links to this podcast on youtube spotify apple and even IDMB show up first on Google before my actual article link does. What really makes me mad about this is thes”
I have two questions, distinguished gentlemen. 1. Could AI do something new, like prove some conjecture by itself without human intervention beyond just asking to do it in the prompt, or is…
“Fair point on fixed fees and scale. Maybe the cleaner rule is a volume limit or an extra-review fee, regardless of whether the material came from AI.”
“I’m not sure I fully understand the issue. If human researchers publish their progress on a scientific problem and other researchers (AI or human) use that to make further progress while acknowledging the work done by the other researchers, that’s just how science works isn’t it? I’m not denying your argument, i just don’t fully understand it I guess. What did OpenAI do wrong in this case?”
“I wasn't sure whether to post this because of the strong reactions the topic might provoke, but I really need to talk about it since it was really unsettling, at least for me. This might be a bit long. I’m a STEM PhD student in machine learning in Europe, and in my lab, the atmosphere isn’t exactly great to begin with: many PI have ego issues or imposter syndrome, publish mostly incremental work in niche (but like many others and myself included, I don't judge), and don't produce pap”
“Archive link: https://archive.ph/20260906184810/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/technology/kenya-college-essays-ai.html submitted by /u/goodiereddits [link] [comments]”
“If something is obvious then by definition it’s obvious. Additionally the formula is simple: AI + effort = writing we can generally tolerate (unless you’re just a bad writer). AI + no effort = writing most people can’t tolerate regardless of your skill as a writer.LLM writing, unless someone puts in the time to improve it, typically follows the exact same patterns and favors the same words. You can’t reas a thread here without people talking about “Claude speak.” It is readily apparent, I do no”
“Wait. But all these Doctors can fetch the actual content from the source. Unless the source is something that can be digitised.”
“Doesn't work. Kids have learnt to type searches from their phones/second screens rather than copy and paste. The real smart ones have learnt not to transcribe directly from a second screen”
“Preface this with saying I am well aware of the debate on whether citing ai is ethical. We are past this point as I cannot stop it for my online students. I have an ai agreement that illustrates that at least 70% of their work needs to be their own and if they use AI to cite it. I had to put heavier points on citation and modified a simple research table describing the source/audience/quote/relevance they fill out with ONE scholarly source outside of the book. They are not even removing the chat”
“Why don't you just have it output a "clear" (0 alpha outside of where it generates marks) sheet with corrections on it that is then layered on top of the students work which is entirely inaccessible prior to the composition phase LLMs cannot produce predictable output themselves, even if you go to extreme lengths to try and reign one in you will get anomolies fairly often. They can however use existing algorithms to perform these functions from libraries like pillow (in this case)”
“I’ve helped him a lot with brainstorming and editing the essay, and we definitely did use ChatGPT to replace a couple words/shorten some sentences to fit the word count, or restructure for clarity. For the most part through, the essay is entirely written by my brother with some help from me. He got an email from his school saying they’ve detected significant AI on the writing, which he can resolve at school easily enough because we have the activity history on Google doc of all his work on the e”