come on feet, pick me up

And that's the combination you need to learn how to pick yourself up after fucking it up. It has to have really mattered to you, otherwise the first time you do fail at something that matters to you you'll go to pieces.

When you do a PhD, you find yourself surrounded by very smart people. Some of them have never failed an assignment in their life. Some of them failed and learned. You can tell who is who from how they react when the inevitable and constant failures of academic life start to hit them. I also see this amongst my students. Often, I'm the first person to ever give them a bad grade or call them on their obvious plagiarism. And those students can't handle it. Sometimes they stop coming to class entirely out of shame, which turns what would have been an extremely minor grade penalty into failing a whole class. My colleagues all say the same - university students right now lack the ability to bounce back from failure at a rate far higher than any past cohort.

This very semester, I had a student do EXACTLY what OP is describing. She turned in a very-obviously-AI-generated assignment, and I called her on it. The assignment in question was a 250-word reading response; all one had to do in order to get full credit was read an article & write a paragraph or two giving one’s thoughts on it. It was, in fact, worth exactly 2% of the semester grade. I didn’t even give her a zero — just sent her an email saying that she needed to redo it if she wanted credit, and that I’d have to put an official warning in the system if it happened again.

Kid completely crashed out. No response to the email, stopped showing up to class. Looked her up in the university system a week or two later — if a student misses a bunch of classes in a row, we’re supposed to file a “check up on this person please” thing — and saw a note from her advisor saying that she’d had a meeting with them where she discussed the possibility of withdrawing from the course because she didn’t know how to handle the AI issue. As it turned out later, she apparently decided instead to just refuse to deal with the whole thing at all: never returned to class, never emailed back, didn’t even withdraw — just ghosted.

Adolf Böhm, Cloud and Landscape illustrations for Ver Sacrum Magazine, 1998-1902

Columbia River Gorge