Nearly 400 university students in UK investigated for using ChatGPT to plagiarise assignments

LONDON July 6: Nearly 400 univeristy students in the UK have been investigated for using AI bots like ChatGPT to cheat in their assessments. Figures obtained by the student newspaper The Tab show that 377 UK university students have faced a probe for cheating on their coursework. Of those, at least 146 have so far been found ‘guilty’ – with investigations still ongoing at dozens of universities.

The data, released under the Freedom of Information Act, also show up to 40 per cent of all UK universities had experienced the issue. This includes 23 of the 24 Russell Group Universities such as LSE, UCL and the University of Glasgow.

And despite the growing numbers, some universities say the actual numbers could be ‘significantly higher’ as they have only begun to scratch the surface of the issue.

The investigations follow a ‘boom’ in AI technology since the start of 2023, which has made AI chat bot technology available to the public on demand – often for free.

UK Universities have scrambled to confront cheating using sources such as ChatGPT, which allows students to write entire essays in minutes with the correct prompting.

Despite new training for staff, universities have struggled to respond to the new technology – which uses real life data and arguments from online sources to create often bland but coherent essays.

See below screenshot of a section of university and students being investigated:

Earlier this year, anti-plagiarism software Turnitin – used by most UK universities – revealed new software that could identify fake essays, but staff remain sceptical about its accuracy.

At the University of Kent alone, 47 students have been investigated for the use of ChatGPT or similar AI chat bots to complete assignments – with 22 being found guilty, receiving marks of zero.

University of London, Birkbeck, and Leeds Beckett University were also found to have investigated the second and third most students in the country respectively.

However the number of instances of cheating could be much higher, as many universities revealed they do not hold data on investigations into the behaviour centrally – or simply refuse to reveal the data.

Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge says that revealing the data could potentially ‘damage its reputation’.

A spokesperson for the University told the Tab that other universities submitting ‘low inaccurate rates as a result of their investigation’ risked the university ‘suffering unwarranted reputational harm’.

Dr Richard Harvey, a professor of computer science at the University of East Anglia (UEA), says ChatGPT at present is ‘almost configured for cheating’.

The lecturer, who has removed an essay from a unit he is teaching next year over fears students could use the chatbot, says he has become very adept at identifying cheaters.

He said: ‘What I see is almost perfect grammar, and a stylistic construction that looks precisely like a 15-year-old school-kid.’

Dr Andres Guadamuz, a reader in intellectual property law at the University of Sussex, is also well-versed in spotting ChatGPT.

He explained he marked three essays in January which were ‘clearly almost just copy and paste’ from ChatGPT and suspects ‘students maybe thought we wouldn’t know about it’.

He added: ‘The voice is very clear to me, I don’t know how to explain it other than it is very boring.

‘Whenever you are reading essays, people can’t help but put a little bit of themselves in that essay, but with ChatGPT it has a very clear structure.

‘It’s well written, don’t get me wrong, but it’s lacking something.’

New anti-cheating methods have also left lecturers fearful of wrongly accusing students of cheating – potentially leaving students with an academically damaging stain on their student record.

One student at the University of Bolton was ‘wrongly flagged’ according to a freedom of information request earlier this year.

Professor Fabio Arico, from the Centre for Higher Education Research Practice Policy and Scholarship at UEA, said: ‘If you actually catch a student and you claim the student has plagiarised and you use these detection tools in quite a ruthless way without actually thinking.

‘You could end up applying penalties, up to an expulsion from an institution for something that hasn’t actually happened.

‘That’s quite serious, I mean you are ruining people’s lives.

‘Overall the mood is a bit better than six months ago. January is when I first started delivering training sessions for my colleagues and it was panic mode, firefighting, people asking “what are we going to do now?”

‘I understand people being scared and people being afraid of change but hey this is our job, we need to train students for the world out there and we can’t just do things how we’ve been doing them for the past 30 years, it’s just not acceptable it’s as simple as that.’