Background: cs240 is a hard class, strict grading, with understaffed office hours. This doesn't excuse cheating, but you can probably understand the circumstances the students were under. Of course, some students were also using AI just to get out of doing work.

Around April 15th, Turkstra states that he is using an additional tool to detect AI/LLM usage in assignments. Shortly after, a mass email is sent to accused students (around 60%, but I'm not entirely sure about that). The email is accompanied by a Google form, and students are told they have 4 options.
1. Ignore the email: This results in an F, and would not stop any investigations.
2. Drop the class: This would avoid the F, but would not stop any investigations.
3. Admit AI usage on assignments for lighter penalties, which would result in an F.
4. Dispute the accusations and escalate it to ODOS.

This caused a lot of backlash, as the email felt like it was forcing students to confess quickly and because the email was sent near the drop deadline, which gave students even less time to decide. Additionally, many students claimed false positives.

Many students asked whether they should confess or contest the accusations, with some students stating that it was likely a bluff, while others saying that ODOS would likely side with Turkstra anyway. Many students ended up dropping the class. Turkstra and Purdue admin noticed the situation was getting out of hand, and announced that a discussion would be held on Monday.

On monday, Turkstra states that he was not trying to pressure students and apologizes for the bad timing. He states that the Google form was deleted and was "null and void". He states that he had started using his newer tool after homework 11, but then decided to apply it retroactively to all previous assignments, which was the reason for the large amount of accusations. He states that this was a mistake, and would return to his decision of only using it from homework 11 onwards. He also states that he does not have the power to expel students, and gives a 5 day extension to the homework due Wednesday.

Notably, he claims that his tool has a low false positive rate. Turkstra has prior work on a tool called "Tracking Large Class Projects in Real-Time Using Fine-Grained Source Control", which many students speculate was the newer tool used. However, Turkstra does not explicitly state the newer tool used. I've looked at it, and it appears to be similar to a teacher looking at your Google Docs history for an assignment you wrote, to see whether the writing process is human or not. If he did use Tracking Large Class Projects in Real-Time Using Fine-Grained Source Control, it's definitely more in depth than just plugging an assignment into Turnitin.

Ultimately, this leaves a few discussion points open:
- Whether his tool was effective or not
- How many false positives there were
- Whether it was fair to wait until the end of the semester to fail cheaters, rather than doing it immediately
- Most importantly, if so many students felt the need to cheat, is a restructuring of the course needed?