There was one problem with the reading material assigned to Ms Pearl (not her real name) for her English course assignment at the National University of Singapore (NUS): It did not exist.

The 21-year-old was one of 14 literature students at NUS enrolled in EN3254 Worldly Words: Written Image and Visual Text this year.

Over the Chinese New Year break in February this year, the professor had given the class a reading assignment, but when Ms Pearl looked up her assigned scholarly book chapter, she could not find the chapter online or at the university library.

When she asked around, her course mates said they could not track down their assigned texts either.

She declined to be identified because she is still a student in the same department as the professor.

CNA TODAY has spoken to three students from the course and seen the assigned reading list of six texts. Based on checks by CNA TODAY, none of the texts on the list exist.

When the students told the professor that they could not find the books and articles he had assigned, he posted an announcement on Canvas, the university's learning management platform.

It was also forwarded to students' emails and it read: "I had drawn that list from existing bibliographies and I suspect one of them was partly machine-generated."

In response to CNA TODAY's queries about the incident, NUS said: "This was an optional exercise to provide additional opportunities for practice and not for assessment, so there was no impact on grades or learning outcomes. When this issue surfaced, students were directed to consult other source materials."

Nonetheless, the incident laid bare an uncomfortable truth for students: Even as universities are erecting rules around students' use of artificial intelligence (AI) and sometimes penalising them for it, their own professors are taking advantage of the technology as well.

In conversations with 10 university professors at several institutions of higher learning in Singapore, CNA TODAY found that most used AI for various purposes, including grading student assignments, preparing course materials and conducting research.

And just as there is rising concern about how students' use of AI might affect their capacity to learn and develop critical thinking skills, students, for their part, are concerned about whether they are being shortchanged when their instructors use AI.

When asked about her professor's response that he might have drawn at least part of his reading list from a machine-generated bibliography, Ms Pearl said: "It is concerning. As students, we trust our professors to check the material before presenting it to us.

"On a larger scale, if academia has been infiltrated by AI such that there are unreliable machine-generated bibliographies, it calls into question the honesty of scholarship and validity of research."

'Almost every instructor is doing it': How university professors are using AI, and why students are concerned