A university junior told the Post how she was placed on probation after her university’s anti-plagiarism software accused her of using AI to write a paper, a charge she vehemently denies.
Marley Stevens (21), a human services, delivery and management major at the University of North Georgia’s Dahlonega Campus, used Grammarly, a web browser attachment that corrects spelling and punctuation, to proofread a criminal justice paper she submitted in October. he told the Post.
But the junior automatically failed the assignment because it was flagged for use of artificial intelligence by anti-plagiarism software TurnItIn.com, resulting in him losing his scholarship and being placed on probation after a disciplinary hearing this month. .
Anti-plagiarism software is installed on the systems that university students use to submit papers.
Stevens is now warning college students across the country to be careful not to be falsely accused of cheating by the anti-AI dragnet.
“I worked very hard on this,” Stevens told the Post about his two-page paper on rehabilitation and reentry rates in the criminal justice system.
Stevens said she knew she had been hacked when criminal justice professor Robert Ellison emailed her to say there was a “positive response to AI” to her paper and that he had reported it to the Student Academic Integrity Committee. I thought it might be.
“He gave me a zero and called me a fraud,” she said. “He was shocked. At first I thought he had emailed the wrong person.”
Stevens, who maintained a 3.0 GPA before the charges were filed, said she installed the free version of Grammarly in her web browser to correct spelling and punctuation errors, not to create or edit content. Ta.
Ellison said in an email that “the entire paper except the last few sentences” was flagged as AI-generated, and that he confirmed it “through another app.”
Stevens explained that this could be due to the use of Grammarly for spell checking, which he emphasized is “different than ChatGPT.” She complained that she didn’t want to fail the class and asked to redo the report.
Stevens noted that she and other students have used Grammarly for other assignments without penalty, and that some professors have encouraged them to install the extension.
But Ellison stopped answering, telling the Post during a hearing last week with the Dean of Student Integrity that Ellison had been placed on probation for “misconduct.”
A week after meeting with the director of student integrity, Stevens said, the office sent a campus-wide email advising students: (AI); Can be flagged by TurnItIn. ”
Grammarly told the Post that “suggestions for spelling, grammatical correctness, clarity, brevity, and tone are not powered by generative AI,” adding that some tools use It warned that content could be “inadvertently” flagged as “incorrect” content.
The Post reached out to TurnItIn.com. The University of North Georgia said it could not comment on Stevens’ failure, citing federal privacy laws.
“Our faculty have communicated specific guidelines for the use of AI in various classes, and those guidelines are included in the class syllabus,” the spokesperson said. “Inappropriate use of AI is also addressed in the Student Code of Conduct.”
Stevens, who works two jobs in retail and is helping pay for a friend who works as a flight instructor, said he considered transferring to another university, but said that would be more expensive.
She has been highlighting her incident on TikTok and was asked by Grammarly on Wednesday to share more information about what happened.
“I’m often asked what advice I have for other college students. My advice is to ask all the professors around you about Grammarly and AI,” she told the Post.
“Please email it in writing and take a screenshot and save it in case something like this happens.”
