I’ve done a lot of grading in a university setting, and this is genuinely a thing. You can always tell, because a student will go from writing like they’ve been hit in the head with a shovel to suddenly writing grammatically flawless, complex, multi clausal sentences. And then back to shove head the next sentence. And if you put the good sentence into google? Wikipedia every time.

The bigger issue is with essays entirely plagiarized or, I assume, written by an AI. Students can also ‘crap up’ their essay to disguise plagiarism which I’ve also seen. The thing I tell my students is they’ll spend more time trying to trick me than just doing the work. But the siren song of an easy A is strong in some.