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Fraud / Generative AI (Chatgpt)

Students, society and the labor market need to be able to trust the value of a diploma. To assure and safeguard the value of the diploma's is an effort of the programme management as well as the examination board. 

New - What about generative AI like Chatgtp in education?

How do you deal with the latest developments around generative AI, like Chatgtp, in (higher) education? Can you still conduct reliable assessments if students can get the information and whole texts ready-made via Chatgtp? Can we prevent students from using Chatgtp? Is it fraud? What policy is needed? Should we want to prevent it or can we actually make good use of it? At UT (and elsewhere), the risks but also the added value of this development are being explored. Read more about it, click [here].

The Student Charter governs the rights for student and the way we treat each other at the UT. The Student Charter consists of an institutional section, this part applies to all students, irrespective of the programme, and the programme specific section as described in the EER for the programme. In the Student Charter is described what is considered academic misconduct and fraud.  
The Examination Board of each programme specifies in its Rules & Guidelines what they consider to be fraud, which may include additional provisions. In the R&G they also set out what action will be taken in cases of (suspected) academic misconduct. In the case of suspicion of fraud, the fraud case must be reported to the EB. The EB will then determine whether the fraud actually occurred and what measures need to be taken.  In all cases, the Examination Board will decide whether academic misconduct has occurred and what kind of measures will be taken.

It can be recommended to make sure that students will be well informed about what will be seen as fraud (including plagiarism and freeriding) and what may be the consequences. As an example: The faculty of BMS has set up a website on fraud and freeriding to inform the students and staff.
There is also a specific site to inform examiners: Guide for examiners and supervisors.

Fraud may occur when written tests are taken. The Platform Examination Boards has developed a Rules of order for written tests. This document describes the rules and procedures to be followed for written tests (including those that are taken digitally). It applies to tests in those study programmes of which the Examination Board has adopted these rules as part of their Rules & Guidelines.

To make students aware of what kind of behaviour is expected and allowed during the time a test is taken, a cover sheet is recommended. An example of a cover sheet as used by BMS can be found [here]. 

Fraud case collection

This document contains a collection of concrete (anonymised) fraud cases. This collection is meant to increase transparancy: the target readers are 

Disclaimer: It is important to use this overview only for the intended purpose. In particular, no prediction may be derived regarding individual (new) fraud cases: every case is different and will be judged on its own characteristics. The final decision always rests with the Examination Board of the study programme in question.

  • Hand writing correspondence

    Case description

    In a written test, students A and B submitted solutions contained parts apparently not written by themselves, judging by the hand writing. Some answers on A’s sheet were written in B’s hand, and vice versa for other questions of the same exam. Moreover, the answers, though not identical, showed strong correspondences, including atypical errors made in both cases. Apparently the students had prepared this fraud together, each of them made part of the exercises twice during the test (once for him/herself, once for his/her partner), then swapped answer sheets when handing in their results.

    Proceedings

    When confronted, the students denied their actions. The written tests were then submitted to an external handwriting expert, who concurred with the finding of correspondence between the two sets of handwriting. When presented with this independent opinion, the students admitted their fault, confirming the procedure they had followed (described above).

    Outcome

    This was regarded as a severe fraud case, because the students had planned it carefully and agreed to act fraudulently (rather than acting on the spur of the moment); and also because they at first denied their actions when confronted with the evidence. 
    Both students were barred from taking any examination in the next quarter, and warned that they would be evicted from the programme in case of a repeat infraction.

  • Open repository plagiarism

    Case description

    Student A, upon failing to meet a deadline for an individual take-home test, copied the solution of student B, who had been careless enough to put it on a publicly accessible repository, without knowledge of B. This was detected; A admitted his fault immediately, upon which the case was referred to the Examination Board.
    Before the Examination Board had come to a verdict, the same student A, now working together with another student C on another project for the same study unit, repeated his plagiarism by again copying solutions from an open repository of student D. This was done without knowledge of either C or D. When confronted with the evidence, A once more immediately admitted his actions, claiming full responsibility.

    Proceedings

    Because A admitted his fraud immediately, the facts of the matter are clear. The course unit reader contains a description of what constitutes fraud that includes exactly the case of copying from an open repository. 
    Students are warned not to put solutions to tests and projects on an open repository, with the explicit statement that doing so may make them accessories to this type of plagiarism. Awareness of this is, however, still low.

    Outcome

    Although A admitted his fault the first time around, he clearly still did not understand or appreciate the severity of his actions. For the first instance of fraud, the sanction was to declare the test results invalid, meaning that he could not pass the study unit any more. For the second instance of fraud, the sanction was to bar the student from taking any examination during the next quarter.

Interesting resources

What can be done to secure the testing process? What can be done to prevent or detect fraud? Here are some resources (NB. Not all are available in English):

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