E-Paper
New transcript issued to student who sued Jindal varsity on AI use
The petitioner’s lawyer, Prabhneer Swani, confirmed that grade of the student, Kaustubh Shakkarwar, has been updated to “A+” & a fresh marksheet has been issued
OP Jindal Global University has issued a new academic transcript for a student and revised its decision to fail him after the LLM student approached the Punjab and Haryana high court disputing the university’s charge that his exam submission was “AI-generated”.
The petitioner’s lawyer, Prabhneer Swani, confirmed that grade of the student, Kaustubh Shakkarwar, has been updated to “A+” and a fresh marksheet has been issued to him.
“Since the main prayer stood satisfied, the petition was closed,” Swani said.
The matter, likely a first in the intersecting academic fields of Artificial Intelligence and intellectual property, emerged from a legal challenge initiated by Shakkarwar — a practising attorney and former law researcher with Justice NV Ramana — who contested the university’s decision.
The university’s “unfair means committee” determined that 88% of his exam answers in the course “Law and Justice in the Globalizing World” were AI-generated, resulting in a failing grade.
Shakkarwar argued that the work is entirely his own and that the university’s anti-plagiarism policies, which would define AI as “unfair means”, are neither formally approved nor enforceable, leaving the regulations open to dispute.
Justice JS Puri, in an order dated November 14, noted that the university revised its decision and issued a new transcript for the petitioner; and fresh transcripts for all trimesters were uploaded on the university’s website.
On Monday, Swani said, “…the university had taken corrective measures. Accordingly, the petitioner’s grade has been updated to an A+. The petitioner was issued a fresh official marksheet today in compliance with the order of the court, and since the main prayer stood satisfied, the petition was closed.”
Highlighting the vulnerability of students, Shakkarwar said, “An important part of being a lawyer is to make the client believe that they should pursue their case and believe in our constitutional courts, especially vulnerable litigants like students.”
Large language models (also commonly abbreviated as LLM -- the same as the master’s degree in law) by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, have sparked a debate over the boundaries of AI use in academic work, authorship rights, and ethical complexities especially since it is notoriously difficult to accurately detect AI-generated text. Tools for detection launched in recent years have failed to label texts from such constantly evolving chatbots, while having also often mistakenly flagging human-generated text as from AI.
To be sure, Shakkarwar’s argument went beyond simply defending his submission. In his petition, he invoked Section 2(d)(vi) of the Copyright Act, 1957, claiming that even if he had incorporated AI assistance, he retains the copyright as the principal author.
Shakkarwar enrolled in the Intellectual Property and Technology Law (blended learning program) in November, 2023. The course has three semesters. All exams are taken at home.
