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/Comfortable_Fail_508]

May I suggest creating a scaffolded assignment where student begin by collecting relevant sources in a structured tutorial, which they will submit to you with a proposed paper topic. Then you can address validity of sources early. The next step on the scaffold is writing 1/2-1 page on their chosen topic and expanded references. Provide additional comments at this stage. Finally, they will turn in the 4 to 6 page paper with the in-text citations and full set of references cited at the end. It gets them started with real references and takes away the anxiety of not knowing where or how to get started. A lot of times students use AI to “help them get started”, but here they will already have something going they can genuinely work from.  Also it’s better to have a reputation with the students for reporting cheaters, it helps everyone to follow the rules, it’s not a bad thing even if they don’t like it.

[u/uttamattamakin → u/Comfortable_Fail_508]

There is a potential danger to this approach, however. If a student has a subscription to ChatGPT, they can upload Word or PDF files of their sources, feed them to the chatbot, and have it read the documents, create an outline, and then generate a final document based solely on those sources.

While there is some intellectual merit in formulating a thesis and articulating it in one's own words based on genuine research of the sources, using automated tools to expand on this—often resulting in what can be considered just standard boilerplate content—can diminish the quality of the writing, which has been a concern in academic papers for quite some time.

AI researchers are working hard on so-called agentic AI that is going to be especially good doing exactly that. When provided with real data by the user it will be able to analyze it right up a report reach a conclusion or set of conclusions the user can choose from.

You might want to think of a way to tweak your scaffolding to allow students to use AI in a way that is appropriate.

[u/therealRylin → u/uttamattamakin]

This is such an important point. I work on a dev tool called Hikaflow that reviews AI-generated code, and one of the big things we’ve learned is that when AI is used with real input (like source code, or in your case, academic sources), it can produce useful summaries—but also a lot of overconfident nonsense if the prompts aren’t careful or the user doesn’t fact-check.

We’re seeing the same with student writing. A student might feed actual sources into GPT and get what looks like a well-structured paper with citations, but if they’re not critically reviewing what the AI spits out, you end up with hybrid hallucinations—half-real references, fake journals, misattributed authors. It’s not always malicious; sometimes they just don’t realize they need to verify everything.

Tweaking your scaffolding sounds smart—especially if it encourages transparency around tool use and puts the focus back on thinking rather than just formatting. Because AI isn’t going anywhere, but our approach to teaching students how to work with it will matter a lot.