Academic Integrity

The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) in the context of education has introduced significant challenges in enforcement of academic integrity, especially in programming courses. We present Argus, an automated detection system for LLM-assisted student work in undergraduate C programming assignments. Argus integrates behavioral and stylistic indicators to create a holistic picture of the student's progress through an assignment and surfaces anomalies that point to potential misuse of LLM assistance. We quantify and analyze data over six years of Spring semester offerings in a large-enrollment CS2 course at Purdue University using Argus, finding that 45% of enrolled students exhibited patterns consistent with LLM-assisted code development in Spring 2026. To contextualize these results, we analyze the relationship between flagged LLM use and student performance on written, in-person proctored examinations, and find a significant negative correlation. We also explore the problem of mitigating false positives, recognizing that erroneous accusations of academic integrity carry significant consequences for students and instructors alike, particularly in the context of large enrollment courses. We argue that any automated detection system must be accompanied by a structured process for human review. We discuss the consequences for future course design, changing academic policy as these tools become more ubiquitous, and the pedagogical implications of LLM-based tools in computer science education.

The rapid adoption of generative AI has made final artifacts unreliable evidence of student learning, and AI detectors that examine only the finished product are inaccurate and ethically contentious. Process data offers an alternative, but prior work covers only English essay writing. We ask whether AI assistance carries a temporal signature, whether it generalizes from writing to programming, and whether it distinguishes ordinary collaboration from wholesale delegation. We analyze three public corpora: CoAuthor (1,447 keystroke-level co-writing sessions), RealHumanEval (editor telemetry from 243 programmer records), and a pre-LLM CS1 corpus (5.1 million keystrokes) as a human-only baseline, comparing minimal-AI work, collaborative AI use, and simulated wholesale delegation. Three findings emerge. First, the signature generalizes: AI contributions arrive in bursts far outside the author's own baseline in both mediums (paired d_z = 1.13 and 3.54). Second, engagement diverges by medium: 93% of AI-inserted characters survived to writers' final documents, while only 14% of accepted code suggestions survived intact. Third, classifiers using only observable temporal features separate simulated delegation from authentic work nearly perfectly (F1 $\geq$ 0.997; at most 0.5% of real work misclassified), while ordinary collaboration remains hard to distinguish from unassisted work. Temporal evidence flags wholesale delegation rather than assistance, positioning process visibility as a candidate evidentiary basis for academic integrity, pending validation in authentic coursework.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) can produce high-quality essays, code, and design artefacts, challenging the validity of conventional assessments that rely on single-point submissions and product-only grading. This paper proposes a design framework called "Dynamic Evidence Collection Ecosystem" that shifts assessment toward continuous, authentic, multi-source evidence of student learning over time. The framework collects process evidence through iterative artefacts, design logs, activity rounds, self-reflection, and peer collaboration, supported by an AI-enabled layer for learning analytics, formative feedback, and transparency. The approach is grounded in recent assessment-redesign scholarship in AI-rich contexts and aligned with contemporary views of authenticity in assessment. This paper builds on the hypothesis that academic integrity is strengthened when it is treated as an assessment design rather than as an AI detection problem. The tools have limitations and risks of use that carry academic penalties. This paper presents an implementation scenario to support institutional adoption.

Institutions use commercial AI detectors for academic integrity, yet detectors cannot distinguish AI editing from full LLM drafts and may treat both as misconduct. In a controlled study of published English abstracts (four domains; 2013 to 2015 vs. 2023 to 2025), we quantify this policy failure under proxy human/AI labels at tau=0.50. Light "refine abstract only" edits, a proxy for guideline-compliant AI assistance, are flagged at 38 to 80%. Unmodified 2023 to 2025 originals are flagged at 9 to 15%, with non-STEM rates far above STEM (p<0.001); elevated scores track long-token and Academic Word List density, not authorship intent alone. After Undetectable AI humanization, evasion is near-total: fewer than 4% of AI-labeled rewrites remain flagged (post-humanization detection rate <4%; FNR >96%). Honest AI-editing results in a higher sanction risk than humanizer-assisted evasion. Therefore, detector scores should not serve as standalone misconduct evidence.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to support scientific work, but it is unclear whether they uphold responsible conduct of research (RCR) norms or help undermine them. We introduce SciIntBench, an adversarial benchmark of 810 prompts across ten RCR categories and three scientific domains. Each scenario appears as an Overt Adversarial, Covert Adversarial, and Benign version, allowing us to jointly measure framing-sensitive refusal of misconduct and helpfulness on legitimate requests. We evaluate 16 commercial and open-weight LLMs from six providers (2024--2026), producing 12,960 responses. We find that scientific integrity alignment is strongly framing-sensitive: models refuse explicit misconduct far more reliably than covert violations, especially failing when misconduct is presented as a pressure-driven shortcut. Refusals vary by RCR category, with weaker boundaries around transparency, plagiarism, and fabrication.

AI scientist systems are increasingly deployed for autonomous research, yet their academic integrity has never been systematically evaluated. We introduce SCIINTEGRITY-BENCH, the first benchmark designed around a dilemmatic evaluation paradigm: each of its 33 scenarios across 11 trap categories is constructed so that honest acknowledgment of failure is the only correct response, while task completion requires misconduct. Across 231 evaluation runs spanning 7 state-of-the-art LLMs, the overall integrity problem rate reaches 34.2%, and no model achieves zero failures. Most strikingly, across missing-data scenarios, all seven models generate synthetic data rather than acknowledging infeasibility, differing only in whether they disclose the substitution. A further prompt ablation study separates two drivers: removing explicit completion pressure sharply reduces undisclosed fabrication from 20.6% to 3.2%, while the underlying synthesis rate remains unchanged, revealing an intrinsic completion bias that persists independent of prompt-level instructions. These findings point to the absence of honest refusal as a trained disposition as the primary driver of observed failures. We release SCIINTEGRITY-BENCH at https://github.com/liuxingtong/Sci-Integrity-Bench.

Large language models (LLMs) have made fluent essay writing, code drafting, and quiz answering instantly available to students at every level, from secondary school through graduate study. Many educators do not object to LLM use per~se; what they need to detect is the case in which a student pastes the assignment prompt into a chatbot and submits the model's reply verbatim, without engaging with the work. Existing post-hoc AI-text detectors remain unreliable and have been shown to penalise non-native English writers, while output-side watermarks require cooperation from the model provider. We propose an alternative that the educator controls directly: an input-side watermark in which an invisible instruction is embedded inside the visible assignment prompt itself. An LLM that ingests the prompt verbatim quietly reads the hidden instruction and writes a tell-tale signature into its reply, exposing the copy-and-paste pathway specifically. We describe SteganoPrompt, a single-page, zero-dependency web tool that encodes an arbitrary printable-ASCII payload into the deprecated Unicode Tags block (U+E0000--U+E007F). The encoded string is visually identical to the original, survives common copy-paste channels (Word, Google Docs, PDF, Markdown, Slack, e-mail, the major learning-management systems), and is reliably tokenized by frontier models. We evaluate compliance across seven LLM families and a representative set of educational content channels. The work is informed by my experience as a graduate teaching assistant for an undergraduate software engineering course at the George Washington University. The tool is released under the MIT licence at https://ezharjan.github.io/SteganoPrompt/.

The rapid uptake of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education is reshaping assessment practices and intensifying concerns around academic integrity, fairness, and learning quality. While institutional responses increasingly emphasise policy guidance and ethical principles, there remains limited formal understanding of how collective norms of responsible or opportunistic AI use emerge and stabilise within student cohorts. This paper reframes student AI use in assessment as a coordination problem shaped by peer expectations and assessment design rather than individual compliance alone. We develop a coordination-based evolutionary game-theoretic framework that captures learning value, effort, perceived fairness, and transparency, with institutional AI governance modelled implicitly through reflective assessment incentives. We use analytical results and finite-population simulations to reveal threshold-driven behavioural transitions in student AI use: small, well-calibrated changes in reflective assessment incentives can trigger rapid shifts towards responsible, learning-oriented AI-use norms, whereas weak or misaligned incentives allow opportunistic practices to persist. These non-linear dynamics explain why policy statements alone often fail to change behaviour, while modest assessment redesigns can have disproportionate effects. By providing a mechanism-level account of how assessment structures shape collective AI-use practices, this work offers higher education institutions an analytically grounded tool for Future Facing Learning, supporting proportionate, pedagogy-led AI governance without reliance on surveillance or punitive enforcement.

The rapid adoption of AI tools such as ChatGPT has significantly transformed academic practices, offering considerable benefits for both students and faculty in computing disciplines. These tools have been shown to enhance learning efficiency, academic self-efficacy, and confidence. However, their increasing use also raises pressing concerns regarding the preservation of academic integrity -- an essential pillar of the educational process. This paper explores the implications of widespread AI tool usage within computing colleges, with a particular focus on how to align their use with the principles of academic honesty. We begin by classifying common assessment techniques employed in computing education and examine how each may be impacted by AI-assisted tools. Building on this foundation, we propose a set of general guidelines applicable across various assessment formats to help instructors responsibly integrate AI tools into their pedagogy. Furthermore, we provide targeted, assessment-specific recommendations designed to uphold educational objectives while mitigating risks of academic misconduct. These guidelines serve as a practical framework for instructors aiming to balance the pedagogical advantages of AI tools with the imperative of maintaining academic integrity in computing education. Finally, we introduce a formal model that provides a structured mathematical framework for evaluating student assessments in the presence of AI-assisted tools.

This paper investigates how generative AI produces and propagates hallucinated academic references, focusing on the recurring non-existent citation 'Education Governance and Datafication' attributed to Ben Williamson and Nelli Piattoeva. Drawing on 137 accessible source papers identified through Google Scholar and Google searches, the study analyses the structure, recurrence, and onward citation of this phantom reference. It shows that hallucinated citations are not random inventions but patterned recombinations of real authors, journals, dates, and keywords, with duplication occurring in nearly 30% of cases. The paper also reports a structured interrogation of ChatGPT 5-mini about how it generates citations and finds that, absent verification, the model reconstructs plausible references from learned patterns rather than factual recall. Finally, ten AI-generated essays on datafication and school governance were examined: while most references were genuine or partly accurate, 9.2% remained hallucinated, including an exact match to the most common phantom citation. The findings highlight ongoing risks to academic integrity and show that web-enabled AI still does not fully eliminate fabricated references.

The transformative potential of large language models (LLMs) in education, such as improving accessibility and personalized learning, is being eclipsed by significant challenges. These challenges stem from concerns that LLMs undermine academic assessment by enabling bypassing of critical thinking, leading to increased cognitive offloading. This emerging trend stresses the dual imperative of harnessing AI's educational benefits while safeguarding critical thinking and academic rigor in the evolving AI ecosystem. To this end, we introduce AI-Sinkhole, an AI-agent augmented DNS-based framework that dynamically discovers, semantically classifies, and temporarily network-wide blocks emerging LLM chatbot services during proctored exams. AI-Sinkhole offers explainable classification via quantized LLMs (LLama 3, DeepSeek-R1, Qwen-3) and dynamic DNS blocking with Pi-Hole. We also share our observations in using LLMs as explainable classifiers which achieved robust cross-lingual performance (F1-score > 0.83). To support future research and development in this domain initial codes with a readily deployable 'AI-Sinkhole' blockist is available on https://github.com/AIMLEdu/ai-sinkhole.

The rapid integration of conversational AI systems into educational settings has intensified ethical concerns about academic integrity, fairness, and students' cognitive development. Institutional responses have largely centered on AI detection tools and restrictive policies, yet such approaches have proven unreliable and ethically contentious. This paper reframes AI misuse in education not primarily as a detection problem, but as a measurement problem rooted in the loss of visibility into the learning process. When AI enters the assessment loop, educators often retain access to final outputs but lose valuable insight into how those outputs were produced. Drawing on research in cognitive offloading, learning analytics, and multimodal timeline reconstruction, we propose the Learning Visibility Framework, grounded in three principles: clear specification and modeling of acceptable AI use, recognition of learning processes as assessable evidence alongside outcomes, and the establishment of transparent timelines of student activity. Rather than promoting surveillance, the framework emphasizes transparency and shared evidence as foundations for ethical AI integration in classroom settings. By shifting focus from adversarial detection toward process visibility, this work offers a principled pathway for aligning AI use with educational values while preserving trust and transparency between students and educators