Dartmouth's provost warned us about AI cheating—but his own AI use cost him his job
On August 9, 2026, Dartmouth College provost Santiago Schnell wrote a Washington Post op-ed called "Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there’s a deeper problem." This week, Schnell discovered the depths of the problem himself as he resigned from the university after an advisory committee found that he failed to disclose significant AI use in an academic paper and in the Washington Post op-ed, even though publishers required such disclosure. Schnell didn't make it especially easy for the committee to investigate his AI use; the report uses the term "insufficient cooperation." He did turn over his Dartmouth laptop, but he did not turn over logs from his personal LLM accounts related to the writings in question. Nor did he agree to meet with the committee. The committee did get access to the Claude enterprise account Schnell had used through Dartmouth, though. This shows him using the LLM as a tool for revising his papers, finding and fixing bugs in code, and editing or generating figures. For instance, Schnell would run his papers through Claude and ask things like: Read full article Comments
Every model that read this
| Model | Provider | Stage | Score | Conf. | Latency | Prompt | When |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Llama 3.3 70B | Meta | analysis | -50 | 80% | 4060ms | v1.0.0 / m1.0.1 | 2026-10-30 21:17 |
AI use by a high-ranking academic led to his resignation due to non-disclosure. This incident highlights the risk of AI cheating in academia.
Evidence extracted
- Santiago Schnell resigned from Dartmouth College due to non-disclosure of AI use.
- Schnell used AI to revise papers and generate figures.
SOURCE Ars Technica: AI (tier 1)
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DOCUMENT 9aeaf557-a439-4b4e-a80e-81c243d18ea8
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/10/dartmouths-provost-warned-us-about-ai-cheating-but-his-own-ai-use-cost-him-his-job
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EVIDENCE 2 extracted excerpts
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MODEL RUN 1 run, methodology 1.0.1
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SCORE -50 (Adverse)
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CONFIDENCE 80%