100%. Students aren’t stupid, they can tell the difference between a lazily designed assignment that doesn’t deserve their full attention, and actually engaging learning moments/environments that will spark something inside them. It’s not their fault that the latter is so incredibly rare in course design.

Sounds to me like they asked the students to just regurgitate genetic course info and then complained when that’s what they received. This wasn’t going to lead to an excellent learning moment for these students whether an LLM was used or not.