Can AI detectors wrongly flag student essays?

Lonely_Wolf

November 4 in Questions

I teach English at a community college, and recently one of my students had an essay flagged as AI-generated. The student insists they wrote it themselves, and I don't have any other reason to suspect cheating. A couple of colleagues think the detector result is enough to question the assignment, but I'm not comfortable making that call based on a percentage alone. I want to understand how often these tools make mistakes before deciding what to do next. Are there any studies or resources that explain false positives in AI detectors and how teachers should handle situations like this?

Answers

Paul_Van_CastelenMember

November 4

Before turning it into an academic integrity issue, I'd look at things you can actually compare. Previous essays from the same student, drafts, notes, sources they used, and whether they can explain why they made certain choices in the paper can tell you a lot. A quick conversation about a couple of passages can also show whether they know the argument they submitted. That seems a lot fairer than treating one detector score as the whole case.
Mike_KennedyMember

November 4

False positives are probably the bit worth reading up on before you decide how much weight to give that flag. Detectors can look very convincing when they spit out a percentage, but the number itself doesn't explain how often ordinary student writing gets caught by mistake. There's a guide on AI detector false positive rates here: https://checkifitisai.com/flagged/teacher-guide-to-ai-flags . It goes into the problem from a teacher's angle, which should be more useful than reading another generic page about how detectors work. After that, you'll have a better idea of how seriously to take the flag in this case.
Tracey_WallerMember

November 5

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