Four students at the University of Virginia have been caught cheating using Artificial Intelligence language tools like ChatGPT to complete their essays. When enrolling, all students pledge to follow an honour code and given that this was the first wave of such cheating, the University made this moment work toward the goal of learning. The students confessed to using such systems and agreed to rewrite the assignments themselves.

A student developed his own artificial intelligence (AI) app to stop cheating using essay-writing bots. After a project on his university course asked him to integrate AI with education, he felt the need to create the software start-up AIED.UK to prevent inequality in academic settings. The student thinks of AIED.UK as a "transitional phase" to prevent cheating whilst universities adapt to new technologies.

The University of Oxford in the United Kingdom has announced a new policy for staff that bans any close personal relationship with students that “transgresses the boundaries of professional conduct”. This comes as regulator the Office for Students works on its regulations for staff-student relationships, launching a consultation on regulating harassment and sexual misconduct in higher education.

The United Kingdom’s top universities are split over how to respond to ChatGPT, with Oxford and Cambridge among those banning the technology over plagiarism fears, while others have opted to embrace it. 8 out of 24 of the elite Russell Group universities have informed students that using the AI bot for assignments will count as academic misconduct. Dozens of other universities across the country are reviewing their plagiarism policies in time for this year’s assessments.

Fontys University in the Netherlands is keen to teach students to think about the impact and use of educational technology through the Moral Design Game. Based on scientific insights, the game challenges players to think about the dominant values that various stakeholders draw on to make decisions. The goal of the game is to inspire and teach students, teachers, and staff to improve their thinking and debate ethical questions.

Questions about using artificial intelligence go further than cheating on exams or generating text for scientific articles. They concern academic values the integrity of academic work, but also the exploration of the changing relationship between humans and machines. A recent statement by the European University Association, ChatGPT raises issues for universities in terms of updating policies to accommodate such tools while preserving recognition of course work and authentic assessment.

To ensure academic integrity and prevent plagiarism, the Paris Institute of Political Studies has banned the use of ChatGPT, the new chatbot capable of instantly writing essays. Without transparent referencing, students are forbidden to use the software for any written work or presentations, except for specific course purposes. The sanctions for use of the software may go as far as exclusion from the institution.

A recently published survey study of PhD students in Denmark reveals that an ethically questionable culture for assigning authorships to research papers is widespread within the medical and natural sciences across Europe. 49% of the PhD students in medical sciences had granted guest authorship to a person in power while 42% were in the natural and technical sciences.

Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is designed to be highly intelligent and intuitive, with the ability to understand and respond to complex requests in a way that feels natural and human-like. College students could use ChatGPT to cheat on essay writing assignments by feeding the chatbot specific prompts and questions, and then copying and pasting the generated responses into their own papers. This highly unethical practice could have serious consequences, including failing grades and academic penalties.

Headteachers and university lecturers are concerned that ChatGPT, which can provide convincing human-sounding answers to exam questions, could spark a wave of cheating in homework and exam coursework. Users can ask questions ranging from simple factual queries to absurd requests and receive coherent responses written in natural English. The output of ChatGPT hasn’t triggered any conventional plagiarism detectors since the text it produces hasn’t been written before, leaving assessors struggling to work out how to identify cheaters.