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I smiled and headed inside, confidence renewed by my transformed appearance. I was no longer the wet, sobbing girl who just got hunted and groped in a tunnel. No, I was a bold, put-together student who was definitely getting that assistant job.
Professor Chan looked up when she heard me enter. She was a serious-looking woman, but the expression on her face seemed especially grave today. “Take a seat, Sienna,” she said, rising to close the door behind me.
I sat in the chair opposite her desk, heart pounding. Judging by her tone and expression, this meeting wasn’t about the assistant position.
She returned to her seat and glanced at something on her computer screen. Then she leaned forward. “We need to discuss the essay you handed in four days ago.”
My forehead wrinkled with confusion. That essay was the last thing I thought this meeting would be about. I spent countless hours working on it over the last two weeks, researching the history of ethical standards in journalism, rewriting every paragraph at least four times to make sure everything made perfect sense, and triple-checking my references to make sure there wasn’t so much as a period out of place. It was the first paper I’d ever handed in at a tertiary level, and I was damn proud of it.
“Is there a problem with it?” I asked, tilting my head slightly to the side.
“Well, first of all, it was handed in late. That alone takes five percent off your final mark. But that’s not the only issue, unfortunately.”
“Wait… what?” My brows shot up. “I made sure to submit it three hours before the deadline, just in c—”
Professor Chan cut me off. “As I said, the lateness isn’t the only issue,” she said. “Do you know how seriously we take cases of plagiarism here at Worthington?”
My jaw dropped, and I stared at her, blinking back my disbelief. “Plagiarism?”
She turned her screen to face me. “Not only is your essay plagiarized from multiple sources, it’s also clear from the serious grammatical issues that it was written by an AI program,” she said. She paused, scrolled down the page, and pointed to the last paragraph. “You even forgot to remove this bit of text here.”
I leaned forward, squinting at the words in front of me. Generated by ChatGPT’s free research preview. ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts.
My eyes bulged as I scanned the paragraphs above that piece of text. They were mostly garbled, nonsensical lines of text that looked as if they’d been copied from Wikipedia and run through a translator five times before being translated back to English.
“That’s not my essay. I swear,” I said, shaking my head.
Professor Chan’s eyes narrowed disbelievingly. “This is what you handed in, Sienna.”
“No. Wait. Please. Let me show you.” My heart raced as I yanked my phone out of my pocket. There was a small crack at the top of the screen from when I dropped it earlier, but it still worked.
She sighed. “Sienna, I don’t need to see anything else to know what’s happened here. The evidence is already sitting right in front of me,” she said. “I realize that freshman students can have a difficult time adjusting to a university workload, but that doesn’t make it acceptab—”
“Please!” I cut her off, not even caring how rude I sounded. “I can prove it!”
She pursed her lips and delicately folded her hands on her desk. “All right, go ahead,” she said stiffly. “Say what you need to say.”
“My friend warned me that the online submission portal can get messed up and fail to register stuff sometimes,” I said, hands shaking as I opened my photo gallery and cloud account in separate tabs on my phone. “He told me to take photos or screenshots every time I upload an assignment. That way, if something goes wrong with the portal, I can prove that I definitely handed my assignment in.”
I opened a photo of my laptop screen and thrust my phone toward Professor Chan.
“That’s the photo I took of my screen when I submitted my essay,” I said. “The timestamp says 9:04 p.m. on Tuesday night. The cutoff for submission was midnight. So I definitely handed in my essay before that.”
She frowned, looking down at my screen.
“Also, see the title of the file I submitted?” I hurriedly went on. “I called it JournalismEthicsPaper101. I can open that exact same document in my cloud account right now, and you can see the essay. The real essay. So I guess someone else must’ve gotten into my account and submitted another paper after I handed mine in. I don’t know how. Maybe there was some sort of problem with the server and it got mixed up? Or maybe someone hacked me?”
“Sienna…” Professor Chan slowly shook her head, eyes flickering with a mix of pity and disdain. She clearly didn’t believe me. She thought I was just scrambling to save my ass. “Are you really suggesting that someone hacked your account on the submission portal, deleted your original essay, and uploaded a completely different paper?”
“I know that sounds crazy. But please, just look at this document on my phone,” I said. A wave of tears was pricking at my eyes, and my palms were starting to feel slick with sweat. “Please. You’ll see it’s not the same as that essay on your screen.”
“Even if it’s different, that doesn’t prove anything,” she replied. “You could’ve submitted it, then changed your mind and decided to submit a modified version.”
“But why would I submit a perfectly good essay, delete it, and replace it with some nonsensical plagiarized thing like that?” I said, gesturing to her computer screen.
“Perhaps your original essay wasn’t perfectly good.”
“Well, there’s one way for you to find out,” I said, voice almost cracking with desperation. “You could read it.”
