Scott Limmer has been a defense attorney in Nassau County for nearly a quarter of a century. Solidly built, with salt-and-pepper hair and a booming Long Island accent, Limmer is the kind of guy who can make anyone feel comfortable, including the criminal defendants who are the bread and butter of his practice. Or at least they used to be.
Lately, college and university academic misconduct cases, wherein a student is accused of cheating, plagiarizing, or fabricating schoolwork, have become a much larger portion of his caseload. The initial spike happened during Covid, when online learning caused a dramatic rise in academic dishonesty at colleges across the country. “A lot of students took advantage of doing things at home,” Limmer says. “There were text groups between 30 and 60 students while they were taking a test. Just wild stuff.”
Then last November the equivalent of an atomic bomb dropped on higher education and its offices of academic integrity: ChatGPT. Suddenly plagiarizing from an old student’s term paper seemed positively quaint. Now students were able to type in prompts and watch ChatGPT and other AI chatbots spit out, say, an essay on the Christian allegories and allusions in Hamlet, or a complex sequence of coding. Unlike in traditional forms of cheating, there was no means of verifying that the work was original, as was possible with platforms like TurnItIn, which check papers against a database of hundreds of millions of archived student papers, journals, books, and websites.
This story is from the November 2023 edition of Town & Country US.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the November 2023 edition of Town & Country US.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
As If We Never Said GOOD BYE
A designer restores a historic home by an the glory it enjoyed during its classic Hollywood heyday.
SIR Mix-a-Lot
Look, Muffy, our old clothes are back! A generation consumed with nostalgia rediscovers and reshuffles trad style their way. The new official preppy dress code is here, and one pony is riding high.
Les Robes Dangereuses
In Revolution-era Paris, three radically chic media stars swept away centuries of strictures about what women should wear and how they should live. A new book unveils the other French Revolution.
A Nose DIVIDED
Legends are never made by playing it safe.
Friends of JUDY
For her fans of 30 years, Judy Geib is a jeweler's jeweler. For young designers, she's something rarer: a role model.
Anatomy of a Classic
A 63-year-old icon just got a face-lift. Can you tell?
This Old Thing? T&C Reviews: Barn Jackets
The rags-to-riches tale of how a humble workingman's staple got its high fashion glow-up.
Nellie Oleson, MODERN MUSE
The kids are in couture and the grown-ups are in oversize bows. When did things get so Freaky Friday?
Loromania!
A standard-bearer of quiet luxury finds itself unexpectedly tap dancing in the spotlight, embraced by American hypebeasts, Gstaad Guy, and Kendall Roy. Back in Milan, it's business as usual. There are 100 years to toast.
Steal the Show
How Broadway fell in love with celebrity producers.