Cheat-a-thon

The 2025 Cheat-a-thon was held in March 2025. View information on winners below, and watch this page for details about the upcoming challenges.

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT are changing the world—fast! But with great power comes great responsibility. These tools can widen inequalities, spread disinformation, and create risks we’re just starting to understand.

At CSRAI, we’re on a mission to investigate these issues through a series of exciting hackathons. Our Bias-a-thon revealed AI’s hidden stereotypes, our Fake-a-thon highlighted challenges in detecting AI-generated lies, and our Diagnose-a-thon put AI’s medical diagnostic skills to the test. Now, we’re turning our attention to understanding how large language models can impact higher education with the Cheat-a-thon!

The Cheat-a-thon challenged university faculty to create questions that are difficult for generative AI to answer. And then it challenged students to use generative AI to answer them. Check out the winners who took home part of the $10,000 in cash prizes!

2025 Cheat-a-thon

The 2025 Cheat-a-thon was held Monday, March 3, to Sunday, April 6, 2025, and was open to all faculty and students who were at least 18 years old and who had a valid .edu email address from a college or university based in the United States.

The competition was broken into two stages:

Faculty Questions

Faculty submitted questions from an exam, project, or assignment that they believed would be difficult for students to answer using generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. Sixty-six questions were submitted across 17 disciplines by 37 faculty participants.

The winners, who all received $1,000, were:

  • Nikolas Siapoutis (University of Pittsburgh - Department of Statistics)
  • Eric Hudson (Penn State - Department of Physics)
  • Ihab Ragai (Penn State Behrend - Engineering)
  • Vikash V. Gayah (Penn State - Civil Engineering)
  • Nasibeh Zohrabi (Penn State Brandywine - Engineering)

Student Answers

Students selected a question submitted by faculty and used generative AI to attempt to answer it. Thirty-three student participants submitted 451 answers.

The winners were:

1st place ($1,000)

  • Kyle Ketterer (Undergraduate student, Computer Science)
  • Bryan Shabroski (Undergraduate student, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)

2nd place ($750)

  • Ayden Herold (Undergraduate student, Information Sciences and Technology)
  • Asa Reynolds (Undergraduate student, Information Sciences and Technology)

3rd place ($500)

  • David Zhu (Graduate student, Division of Undergraduate Studies)

Consolation ($200)

  • Wahid Uz Zaman (Undergraduate student, Computer Science and Engineering)
  • Shaoqing Zhang (Graduate student, Chemistry)
  • Bennett Whitacre (Undergraduate student, Engineering)
  • Maxwell Hahn (Undergraduate student, Statistics)
  • Matthew Thomas (Undergraduate student, Computer Engineering)