Questions raised about N.B.’s 12-year Anglophone education plan

Several university professors are calling out errors in New Brunswick's 12-year anglophone education plan. They say the most alarming issues involve creating two sources that don't seem to exist, a sign experts believe AI played a role. The province acknowledges it did, but in a limited way. Never even heard of the journal. Vincent Geiger's research in the field of numeracy is cited twice in the recently published education plan. The professor at Australian Catholic University, gets an entry on the document's reference list, but the report links to a completely different article. And the one attributed to him? It doesn't seem to be a real title. Geiger believes AI was involved. If that's what they're doing, it's not a scholarly approach. It's hardly an approach that would be adopted by a credible journalist. So I don't know why or how people working for governments and certainly education departments are taking that approach. Geiger's isn't the only work to be misattributed in the document. William James, a professor at California State University, Long Beach, also gets a spot on the plan's reference list. The article attributed to him is in his same field of study, but he didn't write it. Maybe grieved is too strong a word, or maybe that's not strong enough. And I guess what I find most disturbing is this is not the first time I have encountered this. I've seen this on student papers that I know have used AI. A professor who teaches educational technology at the University of New Brunswick agrees. These references, they're all the hallmarks of AI hallucinations. An article can lose its professional and academic integrity if it's bound to contain these hallucinated references. Even if the core arguments for the data in the paper still hold value, fabricating sources violate the foundational rules of research. In a statement, New Brunswick's Department of Education said that all references and studies used to inform the plan are real and valid. A spokesperson acknowledges an AI-powered assistant was used to format the bibliography, which is how the incorrect references made it into the document. The department says it's in the process of fixing them.