// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
CS240 AI Cheating Retrospective
Toward the end of the Spring 2026 semester, I found myself at the
center of a storm involving use of "AI" in CS 240: Programming in C. My
approach to addressing the issue should have been better and is primarily
why the individuals that ran afoul of the clearly stated course policy
ultimately incurred little to no consequence.
I am writing this post largely due to the number of students that
continue to approach me and mention how much misinformation and inaccuracy
surrounds the, apparently, ongoing discussions regarding the incident.
To begin, I wish to be abundantly clear: the Spring 2026 offering of
CS 240 had a clearly articulated prohibition with regard to using AI/LLMs
to solve any assignments in the course. You can find it in the
syllabus here. Specifically:
You may discuss assignments in a general way with other students, but
you may not consult anyone else's work. Among other ways to get an F,
you are guilty of academic dishonesty if:
...
- You utilize ChatGPT or other software to programmatically generate
solutions to any part of an assignment, quiz, or exam
Moreover, the syllabus clearly states that we may not immediately address violations of the academic integrity policy:
If we find reason to believe that a student or team has cheated on
any assignment, we may inform the student or team promptly, or we may
decide to silently accumulate evidence against the student or team on
later assignments.
Finally, it was even clearly communicated in lecture that reading and understanding the syllabus was each student's responsibility, as mentioned on the slide from Lecture 1 found below:
I have been told some people may be implying that the expectations above
were somehow a surprise to those enrolled in the course. Such a claim is
highly specious. In addition to the syllabus, I went back and checked: this
expectation was addressed repeatedly in at least five lectures. I
have included some of the slides from those lectures below. Note that
while some may not explicitly mention AI, my slides are a starting
point for what I discuss in lecture and do not encompass everything that
is said. I will add that I am quite certain that I discussed these
expectations at other times but without a slide to explicitly reference
as well.
Here are the slides from Lecture 1 on January 12, 2026:
On January 14, 2026 I discussed the policy again in Lecture 2. While
the slide itself does not mention LLMs, I did take the opportunity to
mention the policy verbally again. Lecture 3 on January 21 included yet
another reminder...