Choi asked again on August 19. No document arrived.
In September, the Honor Committee sent out its “official notification letter” telling Rignol that he was accused of “improperly utiliz[ing] AI on the final exam in [his] course.” The committee wanted to meet in October; Rignol told them he was getting married in Europe and asked to postpone. The request was granted.
In early November, just days before the hearing, Rignol was back from Europe and arguing about the committee’s composition. He said that its student members should be recused unless they had worked through the same courses and problem sets he had. Choi responded that there were “no grounds to require Committee members to meet the criteria you describe.”
The heating would go ahead.
Oh, that file!
On November 8, Rignol showed up to the hearing and again maintained his innocence. He argued that AI detectors were unreliable. He even submitted GPTZero scans he had made of works by a Yale dean and a former president. These “indicated there was a ‘100% probability’ that selections from these works, some published over 30 years ago, were written by AI, a clearly false result,” Rignol says in his lawsuit. “The Honor Committee’s response was silence.”
The Honor Committee was not silent, though, about asking Rignol once again to submit the underlying Word document used to prepare the PDF of his exam.
“As he had done before the hearing,” Rignol’s lawsuit says of this moment, “he offered to produce copies of any files related to his Yale assignments.”
The apparent contradiction turned on the word “Word.” Throughout the process, Yale had been asking for Word files. Rignol explained to the committee that he didn’t have any relevant Word files. He had written the exam answers in Apple Pages.
In court documents, Yale lawyers express incredulity about this answer:
For the first time, Plaintiff disclosed “that he did not use Microsoft Word” to create his exam submission but instead he used a different word processing program, Apple Pages. In other words, Plaintiff’s defense for failing to produce the requested files was that he did not have to respond to Professor Choi for weeks; he had no obligation of candor to correct Professor Choi that he used Apple Pages; and he did not have to produce the files because the Committee asked for a “Microsoft Word” file but he used “Apple Pages.”
The Honor Committee meeting ended around 2 pm. Wendy Tsung, assistant dean of the MBA for Executives program, called Rignol shortly afterward to ask for the Pages file he had mentioned. Rignol provided this around 3 pm.