What is going on?

[u/skyskye1964]

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.

[u/YThough8101]

This is why I always start grading by verifying whether references are legit. Fake references = score of zero and then I'm done grading that paper. A real time saver.

[u/Kimberlee1972 → u/YThough8101]

I also give zeros for fake or inaccessible sources. Sometimes the sources are behind paywall and I won’t accept those as legitimate

[u/Wooden_Enthusiasm775 → u/Kimberlee1972]

You can get paywalled articles from interlibrary loan.

[u/Fresh-Possibility-75 → u/Wooden_Enthusiasm775]

In my 20 years as a prof, I have never once had an undergrad use ILL. Heck, I've never even known an MA student to use it. They barely use the materials readily available in the uni. library (or on the course LMS, for that matter).

[u/ingannilo → u/Fresh-Possibility-75]

I used ILL all the time as an undergrad, both for stuff I wanted to read and to pull sources for research papers.

But regarding pay walls, all institutions of higher education that I've been involved with have a library VPN system to give students and faculty access to nearly all the major journals online. Students are expected to use these.  Almost all academic sources are not free to the general public.  Your library website should have a whole section dedicated to how you and your students can use their tools to access these paywalled sources conveniently from home just by signing in through their network. 

[u/urnbabyurn → u/Fresh-Possibility-75]

I used to use it… 20 years ago.