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 inaccuracies surround the, apparently, ongoing discussions regarding the incident.
Policies and Expectations: The Spring 2026 offering of CS 240 had a clearly articulated prohibition with regard to using AI/LLMs to solve any assignments. The syllabus explicitly states that utilizing ChatGPT or other software to programmatically generate solutions is academic dishonesty. This expectation was addressed repeatedly in at least five lectures, including Lecture 1 on January 12, 2026, Lecture 2 on January 14, Lecture 3 on January 21, and Lecture 7 on February 4. MOSS was used to identify cheating incidents, and students with highly similar code were confronted and faced consequences as appropriate.
Argus: Another mistaken impression is that we trained our own LLM to assist with identifying students that violated this policy. We did not. The tool developed—named Argus—utilizes static analysis to identify indicators for which it is highly unlikely a reasonable explanation exists. A paper regarding this tool was authored over the summer and submitted to SIGCSE 2027, with peer reviews available.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing