Student Demands Tuition Refund After Catching Professor Using ChatGPT (fortune.com) 75
A Northeastern University student demanded her tuition money back after discovering her business professor was secretly using AI to create course materials. Ella Stapleton, who graduated this year, grew suspicious when she noticed telltale signs of AI generation in her professor's lecture notes, including a stray ChatGPT citation in the bibliography, recurring typos matching machine outputs, and images showing figures with extra limbs.
"He's telling us not to use it, and then he's using it himself," Stapleton told the New York Times. After filing a formal complaint with Northeastern's business school, Stapleton requested a tuition refund of about $8,000 for the course. The university ultimately rejected her claim. Professor Rick Arrowood acknowledged using ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, and presentation generator Gamma. "In hindsight, I wish I would have looked at it more closely," he said.
"He's telling us not to use it, and then he's using it himself," Stapleton told the New York Times. After filing a formal complaint with Northeastern's business school, Stapleton requested a tuition refund of about $8,000 for the course. The university ultimately rejected her claim. Professor Rick Arrowood acknowledged using ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, and presentation generator Gamma. "In hindsight, I wish I would have looked at it more closely," he said.
Not quite justified demand (Score:5, Interesting)
People aren't paying four figures for a "course" that can easily be generated with a free chat-gpt account.
No, they are paying for courses from an accredited institution that supposedly has been reviewed and vetted by the college. Using AI in developing teaching materials doesn't invalidate all the information taught in the class. The student will still receive a grade and credit hours for the class, and those credits can be transferred to other colleges that reciprocate credits from the accreditation agency.
If she really thinks she has a case, then she should complain to the accreditation agency, not the college. The accreditation agency might give her a more unbiased ruling as they have no financial motivation to protect.
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This is like saying that all technical staff are interchangeable.
I wonder if a judge will think all legal experts are interchangeable, or whether the lawyer you paid to represent you should be the one who actually does it...
Re:Not quite justified demand (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that the professor obviously didn't check the provided output very thoroughly if it contained typos and pictures containing AI artifacts.
Which would go against precisely the point you have made. She didn't get what she paid for.
I don't think anyone who knows anything about AI thinks it's a bad idea to use it to hasten the creation of course material, however the end product should reflect the competence, care and thoroughness one would expect from any professor. If it doesn't, the the professor didn't do his or her job.
Re:Not quite justified demand (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that the professor obviously didn't check the provided output very thoroughly if it contained typos and pictures containing AI artifacts.
AI images almost invariably contain artifacts. That's just a fact of life right now. The question that should be asked is whether the artifacts meaningfully diminish the point that the image is trying to get across. If so, then yeah, that's a problem. If the professor was just using it for an illustration and the artifacts just look ugly, then no, that's not a problem. The professor is paid to teach business, not art.
Bogus citations are a somewhat bigger concern. At that point, the professor is actually potentially teaching bulls**t, and the errors potentially *do* meaningfully diminish the point that the lecture notes or whatever are trying to get across.
If the professor wrote the original paper, then used ChatGPT to clean up grammar, and it managed to make some unexpected substitutions that didn't get caught, that's a mistake on the professor's part, and the professor should be more careful going forward.
If the professor used it to write the material because the professor doesn't actually know the material well enough to explain it, that's another matter.
The key is figuring out which is the case.
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I also kinda feel like we should expect a certain level of professionalism, and low effort AI slop graphics hurt that IMHO. I know, no one cares about any actual quality level, but I can see people thinking like the student - hey, the art is crap, there's a bunch of typos... is any of this stuff actually better than random 4chan stuff?
IDK, I don't think the student should be the one making the determination, but if I was a college and wanted to charge big bucks, I'd at least want the stuff the professors pu
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If you believe the student is paying for a piece of paper over learning, then the ultimate point of college is an abject failure.
The students are there to learn, apply the knowledge through testing and validation by a seasoned learned individual, and then move on with their knowledge into the real world. If a learned individual is not learned, then they have bamboozled everyone into believing something they are not. Which means that the learned, and the college ar
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It has been nothing but a piece of paper for 50 years now. There are very few fields that makes sence in any more. Medical, legal and engineering, and legal is debatable.
Re: Not quite justified demand (Score:3)
The teacher may still be knowledgeable, but too lazy to check the output of the AI/LLM, which is indefensible.
Unfortunately, laziness is very common, and the promises of AI/LLMs make it too tempting for many. There are a lot of stories on slashdot about it, such as the recent one about lawyers. This is about people not doing their job, thinking the AI can do it all for them.
So, the teacher made a major mistake. What's the remedy ? They can stop using AI. Or they can start checking its output.
The other quest
maybe if student loans had easy bankruptcy then th (Score:2)
maybe if student loans had easy bankruptcy.
Then the banks will be able to press the schools to do better (tech job skills) and hold costs down more.
Collage for all + easy loans with no risk for the banks or schools = high costs and low effort
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Re: Not quite justified demand (Score:2)
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People aren't paying four figures for a "course" that can easily be generated with a free chat-gpt account.
No, they are paying for courses from an accredited institution that supposedly has been reviewed and vetted by the college. Using AI in developing teaching materials doesn't invalidate all the information taught in the class. The student will still receive a grade and credit hours for the class, and those credits can be transferred to other colleges that reciprocate credits from the accreditation agency.
If she really thinks she has a case, then she should complain to the accreditation agency..
..which is a concept a century old. You can try and argue that someone sitting in a classroom for four years vs. sitting in front of YouTube and learning is vastly different today. But you’d be hard pressed to convince anyone other than everyone else that was forced to waste $80K on a piece of paper. “Because I had to, you have to”, is not how we should justify a degree for any job position. And yet we feel that animosity in damn near every “entry-level” position that
Re: Not quite justified demand (Score:3)
As someone who has taught myself many things and learned many things at university, I can attest that learning at university is vastly more efficient. You can ask your professors questions, they give you personalized feedback for your work, and you collaborate with other students who share your passions.
1 year of learning at a university it equivalent to about 5 years of autodidact learning.
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It's also the case that at University - at least presumably - people who are experts have figured out what the prereqs are that are needed, so ordering, plus what stuff that's just non-obvious to non-experts are important to learn to actually understand the info and fully learn something.
Like, I've taught myself stuff, but a lot of the time it's extremely narrow - i.e. what do I need to know to do task X. And the issue is, I often don't know what I need to know.
What I mean is - I've been trying to of all th
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It's not just the course material you're paying for. It's the very expensive babysitting!
Northeastern? (Score:1)
Bitch, you didn't get into Northwestern. You got the shitty knockoff.
Nice precedent (Score:2)
Now I'll be sued by my clients once they find out I've been vibe codeing for months. In all seriousness, if the content is not any worse than any other course material - who cares.
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Realizing you could have vibe-coded your education?... priceless.
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Now I'll be sued by my clients once they find out I've been vibe codeing for months. In all seriousness, if the content is not any worse than any other course material - who cares.
Professor uses ChatGPT to write the teaching materials.
Student responds using ChatGPT to write essays and find answers.
The FUCK is the point here again? Are we still talking about humans learning? Or actually teaching? You’re really questioning how this couldn’t get far worse? What, are we going to rely on ChatGPT to hire people too? Because that would be rich.
(ChatGPT) ”You are not even remotely qualified for this position. I do not know how you even graduated with your relevant deg
No, no, no! (Score:4, Insightful)
The purpose of a teacher is to help the student understand the topic of the course. How this is done is almost irrelevant. That the professor used AI is definitely irrelevant.
Did the little princess assume the professor made all the materials? The books, for example?
Come on, people, move along. There's nothing to see here other than a student who clearly doesn't understand anything.
Re: No, no, no! (Score:2)
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"That the professor used AI is definitely irrelevant."
I approve this comment. Five thumbs up!
cheating your way through college with AI (Score:5, Insightful)
Letting an LLM do the heavy lifting for your coursework is terribly tempting for a student, but ultimately a disastrous choice. We humans learn by doing and by repetition. The entire point of getting an education, especially for undergrads, is to acquire a firm foundation of theory and practice for your chosen field. The ability to reason and think for yourself is not something you can simply will away with a few LLM prompts.
A professor, or any educator, doesn't need to practice the material. They can beg, borrow, or steal the lesson plan and course work and present it to the students and still be an effective educator. Most undergrad classes are taught with material that is purchased from publishers, and not developed by the professor themselves. And honestly, I don't really trust professors that write their own text books and force their students to buy them.
And if you have ever taught a class, you'll find that the school will give you the lesson plan and often won't like it if you deviate from it significantly. You're given some or all of the material up front, depending on what state your predecessor left things in.
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Professors should create high-quality teaching material and teach their students well. I don't care what tools they use. They can copy from textbooks, reuse material from other professors or use a LLM - or even do it all by themselves.
My professor in theoretical physics did his classes by memory - deriving all the math live on chalk-board. Didn't give a single handout ever. Impressive and I learnt a lot that way. My materials science professor used a textbook, talked and explained that book with a few excou
Re: cheating your way through college with AI (Score:2)
Chances are they were imperfect, your chance of noticing certain types of mistakes is related to how engaged you are with the material as presented. I've seen PowerPoijt slides presented by a good presenter, with errors all over them, but nobody really noticed until it was explicitly pointed out.
If you're not engaging with the material, or you're looking to find fault, you'll notice things like that significantly more than others.
If the professor is particularly sloppy with the materials then there's every
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There is a difference between using a tool, and letting the tool do EVERYTHING for you. Picture kids in the second grade and using a calculator when they are still learning how to multiply and divide. They need to learn the basics before using tools to do the basics for them when they have moved on to more advanced stuff.
For instructors, using AI, but then looking at what the AI came up with and then re-creating it yourself to verify that what the AI did come up with is valid would be using AI as a tool
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You still need to know how to do basic math on your own even in a world with calculators. We don't need humanity to devolve into mental incompetents because AI can do everything for them.
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"And honestly, I don't really trust professors that write their own text books and force their students to buy them."
Well, one of my most enjoyable and successful course in Physics at Uni was given by a prof who was writing a book on statistical mechanics. Every week he handed out copies of some of the new material he had written and we learned from that. I recall at the start of the course he said "I don't recommend a good book for this course because I have not written it yet".
That is what I want, to lear
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A lot of education these days has devolved into "memorising the answers to exam questions"...
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Letting an LLM do the heavy lifting for your coursework is terribly tempting for a student, but ultimately a disastrous choice. We humans learn by doing and by repetition. The entire point of getting an education, especially for undergrads, is to acquire a firm foundation of theory and practice for your chosen field. The ability to reason and think for yourself is not something you can simply will away with a few LLM prompts.
You bring some valid points. But let’s look closer at the secondary education in particular.
The entire point of those providing an education, is profit. They are a business. Which is why we’re still forced to ask what the hell Early American History has to do with a CS degree. That repetition you speak of does actually have value. When you’re actually doing valued work with it. A lot of college work, isn’t valued by anyone. The first two years of for-profit bullshit courses th
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Which is why weâ(TM)re still forced to ask what the hell Early American History has to do with a CS degree. [...] The first two years of for-profit bullshit courses that fill most degree requirements have FUCK ALL to do with a chosen degree/profession AND life in general. 99.99999% of humans have never used the advanced mathematics weâ(TM)ve imposed on students for literally centuries now.
The argument here is that this is part of the difference between a 4 year degree and trade school. There's some basic underlying expected cultural, educational, and critical thinking knowledge/skills that are expected to be taught and hopefully learned.
Knowing history is something many people find to be important, and informs a citizen potentially in a lot of cases. "Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it." and all that.
The math courses specifically chosen (I'm guessing you mean Calculus) are
some of the basic stuff is nice to have but not at (Score:2)
some of the basic stuff is nice to have but not at today's costs.
If the state really wants then make it part of high school. Or better yet extend high school 2 more years (at the states costs) and make the 4 year degree become an 2-3 years after extend HS.
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Similarly, a student has the right to demand a refund from an ineffective educator, such as one whose own competence comes into doubt by using AI to create their coursework.
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A professor, or any educator, doesn't need to practice the material. They can beg, borrow, or steal the lesson plan and course work and present it to the students and still be an effective educator. Most undergrad classes are taught with material that is purchased from publishers, and not developed by the professor themselves. And honestly, I don't really trust professors that write their own text books and force their students to buy them.
And if you have ever taught a class, you'll find that the school will give you the lesson plan and often won't like it if you deviate from it significantly. You're given some or all of the material up front, depending on what state your predecessor left things in.
Exactly. I've taught corporate training classes, and much of the material was not written by me. Some classes were, but even then I used content from our other classes, third party research, photos and graphics in them. I was paid for my subject matter expertise, not for writing original material. The only time I use 100% original material is when I do stand up, cause bands call it covering but comedians call it stealing.
AI got rid of schools. (Score:1)
You have a point. (Score:2)
However, I wouldn't trust AI to replace schools. Tutoring and help for advanced students perhaps, but not the other stuff. Let's not forget: a key part of education also is the social aspect.
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Not saying that Public schools are great at this, but there's really no reason to think that parents are going to be effective in teaching much at all to their kids by themselves - they need state sponsored day care so they can go to work, and most parents aren't actually teachers so range from incompetent to completely negligent at doing education. Just like most people should actually hire an electrician vs rewiring their house themselves.
I'm a prof, and I used ChatGPT. Why wouldn't I??? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am a professor, and I am literally just now creating a new course. Of course I am using ChatGPT. "Hey, ChatGPT, I want to cover X, Y and Z. Suggest a couple of examples." Sure, I may well adapt what it suggests, but this is still a lot faster than starting from scratch.
Back in the ark ages, I created my slides by writing with markers on transparencies (anyone remember those days). Should I still do that, instead of using LibreOffice Impress? Why would you not use a modern tool?
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Do builders buy bricks, mortar, pickaxes and spades or do they produce everything from scratch, scraping the raw materials from mines and forests?
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Using a tool without checking what the tool produces is foolish. The fact that you understand this and are using ChatGPT to give you ideas, but then you go through to make sure that the results are reasonable shows you are using it in a good way. When AI has proven that it isn't prone to hallucinations, then its use can be trusted.
But, if you are being paid to do work and you now find some people willing to do the work for minimum wage, you are misleading your customers/clients, because it isn't YOU doi
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Back in the ark ages, I created my slides by writing with markers on transparencies (anyone remember those days). Should I still do that, instead of using LibreOffice Impress? Why would you not use a modern tool?
Oh yea, and the overhead projector, we had one where the transparency film was on a roll you advanced as you wrote. I also remember when slides were actual slides you put in a carousel that you advanced; changing one meant reshooting the slide and cost $$$ so editing was only done when absolutely necessary and proofing was critical before sending them to production.
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Setting a test != taking a test (Score:3)
In other news my wife uses a calculator to prepare exams for students but the students aren't allowed to use a calculator to sit the test. How unfair!
I think the student should be kicked out of college for not knowing the difference between setting materials and being assessed on materials. They are clearly too dumb to be awarded any degree.
Re:Setting a test != taking a test (Score:4, Insightful)
In other news my wife uses a calculator to prepare exams for students but the students aren't allowed to use a calculator to sit the test. How unfair!
I think the student should be kicked out of college for not knowing the difference between setting materials and being assessed on materials. They are clearly too dumb to be awarded any degree.
Assuming the professor actually knows the material and is just taking a shortcut, that's *probably* fine, at least to a point.
It is important to understand that the purpose of the student being there is to learn from someone who understands the subject, and that the reason they don't let students use ChatGPT is because they want to know what the students understand, not what ChatGPT understands.
On the flip side, the students are there to learn from the professor, not to learn from ChatGPT, so taken too far, that may not be fine, for the same reason that it isn't fine when the student does it.
It's a fine line.
Re: Setting a test != taking a test (Score:2)
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Because the professor could be faking it by using ChatGPT, and be providing incomplete/wrong information. The fact that the -student- noticed problems in the course material means that she was not getting the expertise and precise information exchange expected of someone with the title of "Professor"
Re: Setting a test != taking a test (Score:2)
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The issue is every time I use AI to assist me with Computers it ranges from "ok as a replacement for google" to "this looks good but doesn't work, and hours of going back and forth with stuff that doesn't work leaves me with something that doesn't work."
I suppose as a method to generate debugging challenges for myself it's useful, but again, I and my users have been able to do that for decades without paying for an AI to do it for us.
That said, I keep trying various models because there's so much hype, but
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Yeah nobody has ever BS'ed their way into a position before, claimed to have a degree they didn't etc.
Re: Setting a test != taking a test (Score:2)
Re: Setting a test != taking a test (Score:2)
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Fair point, but unfortunately off topic. You're putting in question the professor's capability, and taking a guess on *how* not *if* ChatGPT was used. My wife uses ChatGPT to set exam questions as well, but she checks them for sanity and then adjusts the numbers to reflect the complexity of what was produced. The simple existence of AI style wording means nothing and you can draw no conclusions as to the quality or accuracy of the material.
Ultimately what you're doing is questioning whether the professor is
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Does he also use textbooks?? (Score:2)
Does the professor also use textbooks? Not authored by him/herself? What is the world coming to!!
Corrected (Score:2)
In retrospect I wish I hadn't been caught.
Total refund deserved, but not for her reasoning. (Score:3)
"He's telling us not to use it, and then he's using it himself," Stapleton
The instructor is not there to learn the course material, the student is. If the student could explain how having an AI, instead of the student, providing answers to the instructor helps the student learn the course material, perhaps she would have a case. The teacher is free to use any and all resources at any time, that doesn't mean the student has a "right" to use the textbook on every exam just because the teacher used it to write the exam.
And the article never mentions how much AI generated content there was. Was AI generated content used on one assignment, a couple of quizzes, some supplementary material, part of the syllabus, or the entire textbook?
I think she is still entitled to a refund, and from every education institution she attended, because somehow they conferred a degree upon a student who has zero clue what the basic point of education is.
Mod this up (Score:2)
Superb point; thank you.
Not really paying for the learning... (Score:2)
There's not much taught in a university course that couldn't be learned independently online. What you are paying for is not for knowledge conveyed to you but for an institution to CERTIFY that you have learned a certain body of knowledge. She got what she paid for.
picture? (Score:1)