ChatGPT Takes Over Senior Capstones: Results In Hundreds of Student Expulsions

Have you ever procrastinated a paper for so long until you eventually forget about it? Except when the memory resurfaces, it’s Friday night and you’re getting ready to go out with your friends. How are you supposed to write an entire paper in one hour? Thousands of college students across the country have found themselves in this exact predicament, and unfortunately, have succumbed to the power of generative AI and ChatGPT to help them along.

ChatGPT, a generative AI chatbot, was initially launched back in November 2022 and has since been used by millions of people worldwide for a multitude of reasons. OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research company founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, released ChatGPT as a tool that can process niche requests and formulate detailed responses on any topic that the user inputs.

Students especially have found creative ways to utilize the software in academic and personal settings to maximize their productivity. Popular topics can include finding information regarding proper paper formatting, asking questions about trivial facts and figures, or even helping students organize their weekly schedules.

However, many students have started to use the platform in nefarious ways — plagiarizing and cheating.

Since the chatbot can formulate its answers in nearly human-sounding ways, students have started to use this to their advantage. A user can input, “Write a one-page paper on how the Roman Empire has shaped today’s modern world” and the chatbot will quickly generate a creative title, several detailed paragraphs with subheadings, including “Government and Law,” “Language and Literature,” “Infrastructure and Engineering,” “Cultural and Religious Influence,” as well as introduction and conclusion paragraphs — all in a matter of seconds. This information could be easily copied and pasted into a document to be submitted for grading, and professors are beginning to catch on.

Pitt-Greensburg professors have noticed an uptick in extremely eloquent and well-written papers over the past year, surpassing even Yale and Stanford quality papers. When run through an AI-detector, faculty has found over 86% of senior capstones this year have been either fully written or heavily modified by ChatGPT. As a result, those seniors have been expelled and they will not be eligible for graduation.

Maybe future students should stick to summarizing texts and clarifying algebra formulas from ChatGPT moving forward in order to improve their education — not threaten it.