How Students Are Fending Off Accusations That They Used A.I. to Cheat

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….