AND WHO TO CALL WHEN YOU GET CAUGHT

Cheating on college campuses has always been an arms race. Students develop ingenious scams, and professors deploy an arsenal of tricks to catch them. But ChatGPT has upended the balance, and now no one knows for sure what or who is on the level. Is a BA worth anything if it's all BS?

- NICOLE LAPORTE

Scott Limmer has been a defense attorney in Nassau County for nearly a quarter of a century. Solidly built, with salt-and-pepper hair and a booming Long Island accent, Limmer is the kind of guy who can make anyone feel comfortable, including the criminal defendants who are the bread and butter of his practice. Or at least they used to be.

Lately, college and university academic misconduct cases, wherein a student is accused of cheating, plagiarizing, or fabricating schoolwork, have become a much larger portion of his caseload. The initial spike happened during Covid, when online learning caused a dramatic rise in academic dishonesty at colleges across the country. “A lot of students took advantage of doing things at home,” Limmer says. “There were text groups between 30 and 60 students while they were taking a test. Just wild stuff.”

Then last November the equivalent of an atomic bomb dropped on higher education and its offices of academic integrity: ChatGPT. Suddenly plagiarizing from an old student’s term paper seemed positively quaint. Now students were able to type in prompts and watch ChatGPT and other AI chatbots spit out, say, an essay on the Christian allegories and allusions in Hamlet, or a complex sequence of coding. Unlike in traditional forms of cheating, there was no means of verifying that the work was original, as was possible with platforms like TurnItIn, which check papers against a database of hundreds of millions of archived student papers, journals, books, and websites.