I fought my way tooth and nail out of the situation and was exonerated, but I can imagine a hundred reasons why any given student in a similar situation would capitulate.
Truth doesn’t matter in university disciplinary matters - only finding someone (not the university) to blame.
They have their own police force, and the segment was about how they would often keep regular cops frozen out of the investigations, and just wanted to "hush things up," often at the expense of the victims.
Universities often want to keep it “in house” and deal with it through internal disciplinary actions - as opposed to bringing in the law enforcement and public scrutiny.
This exists outside the US too - and doesn’t require a campus police force.
In the university a friend went to, such matters (theft from accommodations, etc) were dealt with through the deans office, and calling the cops was heavily discouraged by the university.
This system has pros and cons, but when it’s to do with more serious matters (actual assault, sexual assault, etc) the real authorities should be brought in instead of some bizarre victim silencing and due process lacking internal system.
Somebody hit to our vehicle (owned by a government institution) and tried to ran away into their university, but failed. We had to call the police (since that's a government institution vehicle), and university security guards came and told the driver "if something like this happens again, just try harder to enter university premises, we can help you".
We politely told the guards that this is a government owned van, and we need to call the police, anyway. They frowned very visibly to this fact.
The driver was also very sad about not being able to outrun us.
This was not in US.
If it was, I’d have just let them get away, and called the cops anyway.
They would be charged with leaving the scene of an accident (hit and run). The campus rent-a-cops would not be able to do a thing.
My university wanted people to accept "responsibility" which students took as responsibility for their actions, not for what they were being pinned for.
Of course the students are going to take responsibility for their actions thinking that will help, and then the University does whatever with its mind already made up.
One student had trace amounts of drugs on some paraphernalia. Student didn't show up to their board hearing, so got the default suspension. Could have stayed and brought a lawyer for less than what the semester cost (instead of receiving Incompletes/Fails) and won. Oh well.
This reminds me of the police telling people that writing out a confession will get them a lighter punishment.
https://paulgraham.com/saynotes.html note 10 for the rescue
An LLM trained on course material could in theory be used to generate homework answers, so they wanted to shut it down before it actually happens. (Hell, the demo question on their website[1] sounds taken straight from a problem set) It would be as if the answer key to the homework leaked, except its for every homework in every course. The punishments are to discourage others from building clones. Though I suspect this is going to cause a Streisand effect.
The university claimed it violated their ethics policies, but for what reason? Further the article states there is no evidence directly linking the app to cheating?
It's a bit strange the student in question submitted letters of apologies... For what was he apologizing for? Feels like there are some details missing.