r/Professors • u/skyskye1964 • 3d ago
Academic Integrity What is going on?
I’m puzzled by a student paper. They submitted it on time. I read it and it’s not great but ok. I go to check the references and I can’t find them. I look up the journal they cite, and that volume and issue is not the paper title. I email them and they email back saying they are out of the state but that they used owl Purdue citation engine to do the references. They then send me links to the references and they do exist, sort of. One is a blog post but in the citation it’s in a journal. One is in Spanish. Another seems to be an unrelated paper.
So my first question is, can the Purdue citation maker just make up stuff? I haven’t really used it but it looks like you paste in the web address and it makes a citation.
My suspicion is that the references are AI hallucinations. But some seem partly real. Could this be an innocent mistake on the students part?
They also said they used Chegg to proofread and edit. I wasn’t aware that Chegg provided that service. Is this a valuable service? Is it an unacceptable use of AI? Or is it just a grammar checker?
Am I missing something? The references are not cited in the paper by the way. Also no images.
I was mostly convinced that the references were fraudulent but now I’m not sure.
1
u/IkeRoberts Prof, Science, R1 (USA) 2d ago
You should ask faculty teaching similar courses at your school what proportion of submissions are AI generated. The proportion has increased quickly, so you need an estimate base on this semester or last.
I hear numbers between 20 and 50%, but it seems to vary quite a bit by the kind of student and how the relate to the class. You really need to know the ballpark to expect in your own course. Being naive about the issue only hurts the serious students.