A few weeks into her sophomore year of college, Leigh Burrell got a notification that made her stomach drop.

She had received a zero on an assignment worth 15 percent of her final grade in a required writing course. In a brief note, her professor explained that he believed she had outsourced the composition of her paper — a mock cover letter — to an A.I. chatbot.

“My heart just freaking stops,” said Ms. Burrell, 23, a computer science major at the University of Houston-Downtown.

But Ms. Burrell’s submission was not, in fact, the instantaneous output of a chatbot. According to Google Docs editing history that was reviewed by The New York Times, she had drafted and revised the assignment over the course of two days. It was flagged anyway by a service offered by the plagiarism-detection company Turnitin that aims to identify text generated by artificial intelligence.

Panicked, Ms. Burrell appealed the decision. Her grade was restored after she sent a 15-page PDF of time-stamped screenshots and notes from her writing process to the chair of her English department.

Still, the episode made her painfully aware of the hazards of being a student — even an honest one — in an academic landscape distorted by A.I. cheating.

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