As the fall semester approaches I have two questions. How good is Pangram.com at avoiding false positives for AI prose, and has student AI use grown since ChatGPT’s arrival? Fortunately, I have a dataset with which to answer these questions: seven years of reading responses from my Communication in the Digital Age course.

Unfortunately, I don’t have all the students’ responses over that time, but many of their responses do survive on the students’ HackMD wiki pages. I crawled those pages and sampled about fifty responses per semester. I’d test them all, except this sample itself cost me around $30 in Pangram API costs.

Pangram rates each of the 278 responses from before ChatGPT’s November 2022 launch as human-written. That’s reassuring with respect to avoiding false positives.

After ChatGPT’s introduction in November 2022, there’s an upward trend in detected AI prose, climbing to 42% in Fall 2025. Curiously, the Spring 2026 drops back to 6%. That was the semester I ran Pangram on all readings responses, told students I was doing so, gave zeros to the responses that were written by AI, and referred students who lied about it to the Office of Student Conduct and Conflict Resolution. (I heard some real whoppers this past year.) As I wrote about my process earlier, I also required a link to writings’ version histories and reviewed drafts’ histories with the Process Feedback tool.

So did enforcement work, or did it make students better at hiding it? I don’t know. Stupid misuse of AI is detectable, but others might be getting more sneaky. My policy and its enforcement does have two costs I can detect elsewhere. This past year, my courses saw an unprecedented number of students dropping in the first week—once I explained the AI misuse policy and its enforcement. The spring semester also yielded the lowest student teaching evaluations I’ve ever received in the 2019–2026 period. I think the two are related: it’s too tempting for students to misuse AI on out-of-class writing, want to avoid courses that are rigorously policed, and resent the detection and enforcement that follows.

This isn’t tenable. Though it pains me, I will move further from writing towards testing. In Fall 2027, I’ll abandon the requirement for well-written reading responses and ask students instead to share small-stakes QICs (Question, Insight, or Connection) from the readings. I will adopt higher-stakes but easy in-class quizzes, perhaps counting the best seven out of ten for that grade. In the quizzes, however, I will sometimes ask students to document the QIC they shared before class. If they did the work—or even pay attention to what AI told them—they should be able to answer this and participate in class.