Detecting AI-Generated Code in Introductory Programming Courses

With the rapid surge of generative AI, many tools have been introduced, such as Google's Gemini and OpenAI's GPT-4, with the well-intentioned goal of supporting programmers [5,8]. These tools can be used by professional programmers to help write code efficiently as well as support debugging and testing; however, we recently began to notice an increase in the number of novice programmers who have become highly dependent on Large Language Models (LLMs) to code for them rather than using LLMs as a learning tool [2,10]. In our CS1 course, approximately 10-15% of the students (out of ~350) were cited for academic misconduct due to direct plagiarism from LLMs, many of which performed poorly due to an over-reliance on generative AI.