Visible Adoption, Untracked Contribution: GitHub Evidence of the Accountability Gap Across Three Cohorts of an HCI Prototyping Course (opens in new tab)

This paper presents a longitudinal, observational case study of how student GenAI adoption shifted across three cohorts (Fall 2022, 2023, and 2025) of the same graduate-level HCI prototyping course, using computational analysis of 203 GitHub repositories with student activity and 23,065 student commits. Building on a prior qualitative study of the 2023 cohort, we distinguish two levels of AI accountability trace: disclosure (naming that an AI to...