Low reported severity

Student reports receiving a zero after a disputed AI-detector result

In an August 2025 first-person post, a student said they discovered a zero for a summer-course discussion assignment after a checker labelled 85% of the text AI-generated. They denied using AI to write it, reported contacting the professor, and described anger and fear of future accusations. Neither the detector output nor the school’s account was available for verification.

AI system: Unidentified AI-text detector
Occurred: Aug 2025
Reported: 2 August 2025
Event location: Unknown

What the AI did: Made a claim about the person
Reported harm: Educational HarmPsychological Distress

Whose AI use: An institution’s AI use
Setting: Education

Evidence: AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source; 1 claim: 1 reported. 1 open question
People reported harmed: At least 1 person

AI system as recorded: Unidentified AI-writing detector

Reported harm

The student reports a zero grade and distress after a checker allegedly flagged their discussion post as 85% AI-generated; they dispute the accusation.

What remains unknown

Detector brand, original assignment, detector report, instructor response, appeal outcome and location are unknown.

What the evidence supports

AI involvement: reported. The complete original post was inspected in the public Reddit archive. The grade and detector claims are attributed to the student.

1 claim: 1 reported. What the statuses mean

Reported The student reports a zero grade and distress after a checker allegedly flagged their discussion post as 85% AI-generated; they dispute the accusation.

Causal attribution. The source reports the connection; independent causal verification is unavailable.

reddit.com(opens in new tab) supports · English
Original post paragraphs 1–2 and final paragraphs about contacting the professor and fearing future accusations.

Sources

1 source inspected. Sources that repeat one account do not corroborate each other.

What do you do when you're falsely accused of using AI?(opens in new tab)
s1 · reddit.com · Public forum · English · Inspected · Primary

How the sources were read, and where the events happened

Event countries: Unknown. Affected-person countries: Unknown. Court countries: Unknown.

The inspected account does not establish the event or affected person country.

Reviewed for publication 2026-09-29: The complete original post was inspected in the public Reddit archive. The grade and detector claims are attributed to the student.

People reported harmed in this case

At least 1 person

0 AI participants · 1 other person harmed

One original poster affected by an institutional detector claim. Other students are not quantified.

Counted once within this case. The same person may appear in other cases. This count does not establish AI causation.

Cite this case

Compiled per our published methodology: verification statuses, sourcing standards, and corrections process.

APA

NOPE. (2026). Student reports receiving a zero after a disputed AI-detector result. AI incidents. https://nope.net/incidents/2025-student-reports-zero-grade-after-ai-detector-flag

BibTeX

@misc{2025_student_reports_zero_grade_after_ai_detector_flag,
  title = {Student reports receiving a zero after a disputed AI-detector result},
  author = {NOPE},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {AI incidents},
  url = {https://nope.net/incidents/2025-student-reports-zero-grade-after-ai-detector-flag}
}

First-person forum account: a student in an AP Research course says their teacher reported that Turnitin's AI checker found their source annotations '100% AI' and said the checker never gives false accusations; the student says they wrote the work themselves and can show document history

In a public post to r/ApplyingToCollege early on 1 October 2026 (UTC), a student taking the Advanced Placement (AP) Research course writes that their teacher told them that day that their source annotations had been found to be '100% ai' by Turnitin. The student says they did not use AI. They say their document history shows them typing over the course of an hour and that some sentences closely follow notes they wrote for an earlier assignment. They also say they had faced no AI accusation in a research course with the same teacher the year before. By the student's account, the teacher said the matter would be discussed later and that Turnitin's AI checker feedback never ends up being a false accusation. The student says the accusation leaves them upset and unsure how to defend themselves. No grade or disciplinary outcome is reported. The account is uncorroborated, and one commenter doubted it.

Medium Unidentified AI tool

Israel: Supreme Court finds Ramat Gan refused a special-education pupil school transport in a letter resting on uncontrolled AI use and invented rulings

In May 2025 the Ramat Gan municipality in Israel refused a request that a special-education pupil be given school transport from his father's home, citing an Education Ministry director-general circular and quotations from recent rulings. The father's lawyer could not find the circular, and the Education Ministry said it did not know it. After the father petitioned the Tel Aviv District Court, the municipality agreed in July 2025 to restore the transport but again filed invented quotations, and the district court refused costs. On appeal, the Supreme Court (Deputy President Noam Sohlberg, ruling published 22 March 2026) held that the documents left no doubt that the municipality had used artificial intelligence and that its decision, at least as presented to the pupil, clearly rested on uncontrolled AI use. It ordered the municipality to pay 30,000 shekels in costs.

Medium Turnitin AI-text detector

Adelphi accused Orion Newby of AI plagiarism after a detector flagged his paper; a Nassau County judge ordered the finding expunged

Orion Newby, an Adelphi University first-year student with language and auditory processing disabilities, received a zero in November 2024 on a World Civilizations paper after the professor suspected it was AI-generated and the university relied in part on AI-detection software; he was ordered to attend a plagiarism workshop and his appeal was denied, leaving him one finding from suspension or expulsion. Newby — who had written the paper with 15-20 hours of tutor support through the university's own disability program — said the detectors flagged his citations, and two other detectors scored the paper as human. After the family sued, New York State Supreme Court Judge Randy Sue Marber in Nassau County ruled on 28 January 2026 that Adelphi's finding and its denial of his appeal were 'without valid basis and devoid of reason' and ordered his record expunged. The family spent six figures on legal costs.

Low Turnitin AI-text detector

Australian Catholic University: ABC reports students wrongly accused of AI cheating, one case resting on a lone AI-detection report

The ABC reported on 9 October 2025 that Australian Catholic University (ACU) registered nearly 6,000 cases of alleged academic misconduct across its nine campuses in 2024, according to internal documents, and that about 90 per cent of the referrals related to AI use. The ABC reports that the university's case against a final-year paramedic student hinged on a single AI-generated report that, the student said, marked 84 per cent of an essay as AI-written; the student produced dozens of pages of evidence and the ABC describes the student as wrongly accused. Students the ABC spoke to said they were notified at the end of semester, had little time to respond and waited months to be cleared, and the ABC saw emails asking students for handwritten notes and internet search histories. A final-year nursing student was cleared after six months, during which her transcript read 'results withheld'; she believes this cost her a graduate position, and the report does not say what evidence prompted her referral. The ABC says internal documents show ACU knew of problems with the detector for more than a year before abandoning the Turnitin tool in March. ACU's deputy vice-chancellor called the figures substantially overstated, said cases resting solely on Turnitin's AI detection were dismissed immediately, acknowledged investigations were not always timely and said the university regretted the impact on some students.

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