Two data science professors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign say that after students were caught cheating, they sent "sincere" apologies via email, but they soon realized that the vast majority the apologies were AI-generated. Karle Flanagan and Wade Fagen-Ulmschneide, known as the "Data Science Duo," displayed images of the near-identical messages and read them aloud during an Oct. 17 class, the New York Times reports. An image from the introductory data science class went viral on social media.
"They said, 'Dear Professor Flanagan, I want to sincerely apologize,'" Flanagan tells the Times. "And I was like, Thank you. They're owning up to it. They're apologizing. And then I got another email, the second email, and then the third. And then everybody sort of sincerely apologizing, and suddenly it became a little less sincere." More than 100 students in the class had been caught cheating on an app to track engagement and attendance called the Data Science Clicker, possibly unaware that their professors were extremely well-equipped to detect such shenanigans.
The professors say they decided to teach the students a lesson on "academic integrity" instead of taking disciplinary action. "Life lesson: if you're going to apologize, don't use ChatGPT to do it," Flanagan said in an Instagram post. Vinayak Bagdi, who took the data science class as a freshman, tells the Times that the course isn't an especially tough one and the professors work hard to help students succeed. "You're not even coming to the class, and then you can't even send a sincere email to the professor saying, 'I apologize'?" he says. "Out of any class at the university, why skip that one?"
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