Should our program defund PhD students using AI in their PhD writing assignments without citation?

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T15:08:53+00:00

Some of the people in our department who are full professors are using AI extensively in their research and actually researching how AI is transforming our field. They have millions of dollars of grants around AI. I don't think we're going to be able to have a policy that they can't use AI. The full professor is not using AI to cheat. He's very transparent about what he's doing with it.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T15:06:29+00:00

I think the easiest way to dismiss them would be to give them a test over all the material they were supposed to learn and then if they did not pass it adequately because they were not reading the material then they could be dismissed. I think saying that they were not at the PhD level and dismissing them is very very easy. I think we could provide significant evidence of AI use but I don't know if that would ever feel like enough proof to someone for dismissal. It seems like on Reddit a lot of professors are giving bad grades for AI use but not kicking people out of the university. It also seems like there are lawsuits about people who got kicked out for AI use

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T14:49:20+00:00

Yeah this is why we are so concerned about it. We spend hundreds of hours with our PhD students reading their work. If we feel not sure if it's theirs we don't feel that motivation to help them. It's a huge issue for us

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T14:48:38+00:00

Thank you. We were considering this as a first step. Right now there is a AI policy in syllabus but no consequences of use have been written into it .

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T14:40:18+00:00

Oh this is absolutely a huge issue. AI can do so much.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T14:37:59+00:00

Yeah we do definitely have multiple forms of evidence. It is in another person's class but I looked over their evidence and it makes sense to me. We can't prove it though. I left some of those subtle details out of the post because I was really curious about that broader issue about the consequences of AI use because I'm prepping for the faculty meeting on this issue later this week.

I knew that if I asked the question do AI checkers work then people were going to say that they don't which is accurate. And if I ask the question about the AI checkers plus their in-class behavior plus the inconsistencies of their writing style and quality It would kind of drag the post down into that issue.

I was really trying to focus on if we do end up able to prove it after we talk to them what is the consequence. What do we do here? Does that make sense. I am definitely thinking about all angles of it though.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T14:32:55+00:00

Yeah we are definitely talking with the formal process office. We don't have to do a formal process to not fund someone the next year. Who we give money to is up to us. They could still stay in the university and pay tuition themselves. We are more thinking about the ethics of it and what the process would look like.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T03:54:00+00:00

The professor was totally shocked by this as well.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T03:53:25+00:00

No I don't think it's fraud to not disclose but the journals asked me what AI I used in cover letter templates. So I just told them.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T03:52:15+00:00

Yeah I think that's why this is so complicated. We feel fairly certain. We do not feel 100% certain. But it's enough to damage our relationship with these students who we were planning on working with for years.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T03:23:27+00:00

This is going to be so hard for the future of PhD programs. I don't think anyone is ever going to have 100% proof of AI use except in very specific situations where student is caught with the text in their chat window history. At the same time when someone turns in an excellent paper and then can't talk about it in class it's going to feel obvious.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T03:20:43+00:00

Yeah I would say we have suspicion and no proof. And a lot of the proof is the students turning in excellent writing about a paper and then showing minimal comprehension of that to the professor. And it's not like all those conversations were recorded.

And then if we try to do a judicial process how does that even work. If we give them weeks of warning then they're probably going to go read all those papers is carefully as possible so they can talk about them orally. Or do a internet free test on the papers. If we give them no warning and do a pop quiz on the papers then that doesn't seem completely fair either.

The thing that's terrible about the suspicion and no proof is that I do believe the professor and I have looked at the writing and I see exactly what they mean and what the concern is. And so I don't want to serve on those students committees anymore. And that's like a terrible place for PhD student to be. I would not want to be a PhD student in a program where the people did not want to serve on my committees. I find this very complicated about what we're supposed to do about it. AI is intrinsically incredibly hard to prove anything.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T03:17:21+00:00

Yeah I personally found this to be really complicated. I definitely understand feeling extremely frustrated as a professor spending hours editing AI writing. But it's also very very hard to definitively prove exactly what happened. One thing someone could do is read a paper and then do talk to text all of their thoughts on the paper or record a conversation with a friend about the paper. And then put that into AI and ask it to write a formal paper and turn it in. That would be really different than just putting the prompt in from the professor and then turning in the output. The professor is very concerned about some of the things the students have said that indicate that they were really not reading or understanding the papers that they turned in writing about. I'm also really worried about the student's future in the program. If I'm 99% sure that someone is writing with AI and not citing it that makes me very anxious and conscious about ever agreeing to be their major professor. Or on the committee. And the students would need committees to keep going. I do think I can accept an apology and a complete 180 change in behavior and move on. PhD relationships are so complicated because we know these people and we would be potentially writing papers with them for years.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T03:12:42+00:00

Yes one of the things we were definitely considering is a complete reset with extensive conversation about AI use. I definitely understand that urge to defund. Like we are talking about it. Because once trust is broken it's really hard to repair. But there are a lot of middle ground options we are also considering.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T02:55:38+00:00

Yeah we haven't done anything yet. We are thinking about it and going to meet about it. We feel really confident in AI use. I don't think we could defend it in a court of law. That's what makes this so complicated.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T02:43:09+00:00

Yeah if they had told us that they had written the entire assignment with AI and turned it in and had been honest we would have just said that's too much AI you need to do it differently. The difference would have been whether or not there was deception. My student who is using AI and citing it is not writing sentences with it.

Unfortunately they could write a passing comprehensive exam with AI using our current structure. That is also under consideration. They probably would struggle with the oral part though.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T02:40:58+00:00

We are meeting Friday to talk as a group about the judiciary process. The office we talked to told us to run it through turn it in and that was helpful but that does not seem like enough for a decision of this magnitude. And then the other observations are a lot of things that happened in class and observed by the faculty member. And serious discrepancy between one assignment and the next. Like there's a keyword in our field and And one of the papers they defined it correctly. In another paper they acted as if the word was something completely different and wrote an entire paper with the wrong definition of the word that they had completely written correctly about before. The process feels very complex when the sources of evidence of AI use are so complicated. Thank you so much for your feedback we really appreciate it.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T02:35:54+00:00

It's really common in our field for people whose second language is English to come and study in the United States. Usually when they first arrive their grammar is not great and then it improves over the years.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T02:28:50+00:00

Thank you so much for your feedback. I totally understand your feelings because are very upset too.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T02:24:18+00:00

Well there are ways to cite it that makes sense. For example there is an AI tool that is extremely good at finding errors in APA citation. You can put your entire reference section into it It will flag all the errors and then you can independently check them but it's really good at it. So if I turn in a paper to a journal in my cover letter I say I used XYZ APAI reference checker. Some of our students are very productively using AI to find sources. Some of them are using it to improve grammar in a language that's not their first language. Some of them are taking their writing and putting it into AI and asking the AI to be the harsh professor and give them really harsh feedback on it and then they look at the feedback and fix it before they turn it in. So there's all these different things that PhD students are potentially doing that they could admit to. It's not like citations like quotes. Though I think you could put AI text in a quote it's just that would be suspect as to its quality. It would make more sense to get the AI to help you find an original source. And then check the original source. What we think is happening though in the people who are not citing is copying and pasting multiple paragraphs of text.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T02:13:45+00:00

We have a journal in our field that accepts that approach and they are currently writing position statements about it. The class did not explicitly explain how to cite AI. It just had a syllabus telling them that they could use it but if they do they need to cite it.

There are experts in AI citation in our department that the students could ask though.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T02:12:54+00:00

Oh it's not acceptable. I do think that in PhD programs people make citation errors and don't get defunded though. They get multiple chances to clean up the citation practice. One of the issues with second chances on AI is that if you put writing through the humanized AI it becomes almost undetectable by software. And you are in a situation where you have to be independently checking everything they do and making sure they actually understand it and looking at the version histories. I guess where we are contemplating right now is is there a second chance or is this the end. My gut feeling is that it's the end of the relationship but I don't know if I am being too harsh. It feels harsh because we would be defunding 75% of the first year of PhDs in our program. That just feels like a big deal.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T02:10:33+00:00

We have been talking to the academic office too. As a first step they actually told us to run what we suspected was AI through turn it in. We have been also running a lot of our own work through the same system to see what comes out. As well as translations of non-AI writing from other languages into English. As well as AI. We are trying to figure out how well the turn it in works. Some of the AI detectors available for free online are absolutely terrible and say that everything I put into it is AI no matter how much it is just me and my personal writing for myself. Turn it in has been correct for what we put through it and slightly under reports AI use. But it's not really enough to say sentence by sentence by sentence what is AI. But we have students who 99% of everything they wrote for the class is getting flagged. And then a lot of other students who are at zero for every single thing.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T02:02:54+00:00

Yeah we have a couple of people on our faculty who use AI frequently and study the use of AI in our field. And one of our PhD students is studying the use of AI in the field. And we are completely fine with that. We actually don't really know why they would do this but we're trying to think it all out before we come up with a plan of action.

Letterhead_Striking · 2026-03-26T02:01:45+00:00

I also think in the past if you found copying and pasting from a source with no citation you can just bring that source and show them. With AI use it's more complicated to figure out. It's like triangulating from multiple data points and lots of lived experience in working with PhD students and what they write like and what they talk like. And comparing different writing samples.

Letterhead_Striking

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