AI Misuse by a Professor Delays Texas A&M Diplomas

Texas A&M University Commerce professor Jared Mumm delayed diplomas for a class of graduating seniors in May 2023 after improperly using ChatGPT to accuse them of submitting AI generated final essays.

Mumm copied student submissions into ChatGPT and asked the chatbot whether it had written them, telling the class bluntly that he does not grade AI work.

The method is fundamentally unreliable because ChatGPT is a text generator rather than a plagiarism detector and routinely claims authorship of human writing; when tested against Mumm's own doctoral dissertation, the chatbot said the passage could indeed have been generated by a language model.

Affected students received temporary X incomplete grades that held up their official diplomas even after they had walked at commencement.

Students fought back with Google Docs timestamps proving original authorship, at least one received an apology and was exonerated, and the university confirmed that no one failed the course or was barred from graduating.

The episode drew national attention as an early high profile example of educators misapplying AI tools and pushed the university to develop formal policies on AI detection.

The professor was wrong, and the tools built to replace guesswork proved little better. Stanford HAI reported in May 2023 that seven detectors flagged 61 percent of essays by non-native English writers as machine written, and Turnitin later revised its false positive rate upward. Campuses have been switching the software off since: Vanderbilt, Yale, Northwestern and Georgetown sit among at least a dozen, and several now bar faculty from treating a score as sole evidence. Students carry the cost of an accusation built on probability, so blue books and oral exams are back. With 73 percent of faculty reporting AI integrity cases, per Inside Higher Ed, watch how many syllabi still lean on a detector when fall 2026 opens.