Is ChatGPT grounds for academic integrity violations or plagiarism

Universities have a long history of frowning upon plagiarism. Plagiarism is often defined as intentionally or knowingly representing the words or ideas of another as one’s own in any academic exercise. In situations where students are accused of committing plagiarism, students face disciplinary actions for academic dishonesty under the university’s respective student codes of conduct.

The invention of ChatGPT has created a unique situation where Universities are having to revisit their long-standing on plagiarism and academic dishonesty as a whole. ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool driven by artificial intelligence that allows you to have human-like conversations with a chatbot developed by OpenAI in November 2022. The chatbot is proficient at writing and responding to questions with specific parameters or directions. Soon after its launch, students began using this chatbot to complete their university assignments.

You may ask, is this AI chatbot capable of completing a university student’s assignments? Well, a professor from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania found that ChatGPT would pass a Wharton MBA exam. It could also score in the 93rd percentile on a simulated SAT exam. So, there is absolutely the potential for students to begin using this chatbot to write their papers. But would that be considered plagiarism?

As a result, universities are having to update their policies on plagiarism and academic dishonesty to include the use of ChatGPT. Students defending themselves against the allegations of plagiarism through their use of ChatGPT argued that the definition of plagiarism involves the words or ideas of another. ChatGPT cannot satisfy the element of the words or ideas of another because it is a program and not another person. As a result, universities have been having to update their student codes of conduct to either update the definition of plagiarism, outright prohibit the use of ChatGPT, or qualify the use of ChatGPT in academics as an academic integrity violation for attempting to attain an unfair advantage. A student can argue whether or not using ChatGPT offers an unfair advantage, but if the school explicitly prohibits the program’s use, then that point is moot.

So how do universities catch a student using ChatGPT in their assignments? Universities and professors can detect ChatGPT through software such as GPTZero and Originality AI. Also because of the language model used by AIs, some professors can learn a knack for recognizing the generic broad-based language used by ChatGPT.

Is it ever ok to use ChatGPT in school? Using this program for spelling and grammar checks, outlining, or brainstorming ideas should be acceptable in most situations. But you must remember that ChatGPT draws all of its information from somewhere else on the internet.

Meaning that you can quickly fall into academic unfairness and even plagiarism the more you incorporate ChatGPT’s work into your own.

If you find yourself in a situation where you are being accused of plagiarism or academic integrity violations we are here to help.