A disputed exam, an unreliable detector, and one very late Apple Pages file.
Thierry Rignol is furious at Yale.
Rignol paid Yale $208,500 in tuition for its Executive MBA program. But after he was accused of cheating, the school suspended him for a year and gave him an F in the course Sourcing and Managing Funds.
This happened despite the fact that Rignol was a “top student, on track to graduate first in his class,” he says. As a result, Rignol missed out on being named class valedictorian, an honor he claims to have earned “under Yale’s own stated criterion.”
So Rignol sued the school. His lawsuit has been running since February 2025. It opened with a motion to “Proceed in Fictitious Name”—which was denied—and has since sprawled across 125 docket entries and a highly unusual third amended complaint. It appears to be nowhere near trial.
What issue was big and loud enough to produce all this sound and fury? Artificial intelligence, of course.
Rignol’s final exam in Sourcing and Managing Funds was flagged as possibly composed with the aid of generative AI. Rignol’s professor used an AI detection tool called GPTZero on Rignol’s text. The tool said that whole sections were likely AI-generated. But such tools have well-known weaknesses; most are unreliable, and even Yale has noted that trying to police AI use through detection tools is infeasible.
In Rignol’s telling, his long, perfectly formatted test answers were the product of his own intelligence. “It was entirely expected,” his lawsuit says, “that [Rignol’s] exam writing would be thorough, well-organized, and display near perfect punctuation and grammar, attributes consistent with his academic excellence.”
There was also the matter of his French background. Rignol calls out “GPTZero’s known bias against non-native English speakers” like himself, and he argues that detectors can mistake the formal, structured prose of such writers for AI-generated text.
But it’s not just tools like GPTZero that enrage Rignol. He believes that Yale itself is against him and that the whole “sham” disciplinary process was designed to censor his “protected conservative political speech” after he advocated in courses for “smaller government, pro-business policies, and skepticism of DEI.”
After several expansions, Rignol’s case now contains 13 separate causes of action against Yale, including breach of contract, civil rights violations, emotional distress, unfair trade practices, defamation, and invasion of privacy. He wants damages “without limitation” to cover his physical well-being, emotional state, reputation, “past and future economic losses,” and damage to career prospects.
Despite everything, Rignol’s lawsuit still demands that Yale take him back (though the university says he has already returned from his suspension and has graduated). Rignol also wants his F reversed and his disciplinary records expunged.
But was Rignol actually the victim of a bad detection algorithm and political hostility at Yale? The school doesn’t think so—and it wants to know why Rignol took months to turn over a key file.
Incomplete
The saga began with the final exam in the spring 2024 session of MGT423E, Sourcing and Managing Funds. The test ran for four hours and was self-timed; it was “open book” but “closed Internet.” AI tools were strictly disallowed. Students wrote answers on their computers, generated PDFs from those files, and submitted the PDFs to their instructors. Of 72 students, only Rignol’s exam was flagged by a teaching assistant for possible AI use, in part because of its unusual length.
One of the course’s professors, K. Geert Rouwenhorst, emailed his dean on June 11 to describe the suspicions about the exam. While Rignol had argued largely over the use of tools like GPTZero, Rouwenhorst made clear that his teaching team had multiple reasons for concern.
First, he said, GPTZero thought it likely that AI was used in several answers. Second, one answer showed “substantial overlap” with output generated by ChatGPT in response to the same question. Third, Rignol “performed relatively poorly on question 5, where AI tools were the least helpful.” Finally, the teaching team questioned—though without testing the theory—whether anyone could have produced an exam of that length and polish within four hours.
The next day, Rignol learned that he would receive an “Incomplete” in the course while the issue was investigated.
Over the summer of 2024, various administrators looked into the matter. Rignol claimed innocence, saying the exam merely reflected his “exceptional performance as the top student in his class and his distinctive writing style as a non-native English speaker.” He thought Yale was pressuring him to falsely confess by “revising” his statement; the alternative, he thought, was to “refuse to confess and risk expulsion.”
Rignol even claims that one Yale dean “escalated the pressure by invoking the fear of deportation.” (Yale says that it has the right to explain to students what the consequences of disciplinary actions might be. In this case, Rignol was in the US on an investor visa, not a student visa, and Yale discipline would not have led to his visa being revoked.)
Yale sees things differently, and its filings portray Rignol as stalling and evasive. For instance, finance professor James Choi, who led the Honor Committee investigating the case, emailed Rignol multiple times looking for the underlying file Rignol had used to draft his exam answers. (Yale says that this file “could have shed light on whether Plaintiff used AI tools.”)
On August 10, Choi wrote:
Through Dean Wendy Tsung, I have twice asked you to send us the Microsoft Word file that produced [the] PDF file you submitted for the exam. I am now asking you directly. I remind you that when a student has been found by the Honor Committee to have lied to or not been forthcoming with the Committee, the most common punishment is permanent expulsion from Yale.
On August 12, Choi followed up to ask about the file again. “Should I note that you are refusing to share this file with the Honor Committee?” he asked.
On August 16, after Rignol expressed confusion about what was being asked of him and why, Choi responded, “I am asking you to send us the Word file from which the PDF was produced. You seem to be weighing whether you will cooperate or not. It’s your choice, but if history is a guide, failure to cooperate would be viewed by the Honor Committee as an extraordinary violation of the Honor Code.”
Choi asked again on August 19. No document arrived.
In September, the Honor Committee sent out its “official notification letter” telling Rignol that he was accused of “improperly utiliz[ing] AI on the final exam in [his] course.” The committee wanted to meet in October; Rignol told them he was getting married in Europe and asked to postpone. The request was granted.
In early November, just days before the hearing, Rignol was back from Europe and arguing about the committee’s composition. He said that its student members should be recused unless they had worked through the same courses and problem sets he had. Choi responded that there were “no grounds to require Committee members to meet the criteria you describe.”
The hearing would go ahead.
Oh, that file!
On November 8, Rignol showed up to the hearing and again maintained his innocence. He argued that AI detectors were unreliable. He even submitted GPTZero scans he had made of works by a Yale dean and a former president. These “indicated there was a ‘100% probability’ that selections from these works, some published over 30 years ago, were written by AI, a clearly false result,” Rignol says in his lawsuit. “The Honor Committee’s response was silence.”
The Honor Committee was not silent, though, about asking Rignol once again to submit the underlying Word document used to prepare the PDF of his exam.
“As he had done before the hearing,” Rignol’s lawsuit says of this moment, “he offered to produce copies of any files related to his Yale assignments.”
The apparent contradiction turned on the word “Word.” Throughout the process, Yale had been asking for Word files. Rignol explained to the committee that he didn’t have any relevant Word files. He had written the exam answers in Apple Pages.
In court documents, Yale lawyers express incredulity about this answer:
For the first time, Plaintiff disclosed “that he did not use Microsoft Word” to create his exam submission but instead he used a different word processing program, Apple Pages. In other words, Plaintiff’s defense for failing to produce the requested files was that he did not have to respond to Professor Choi for weeks; he had no obligation of candor to correct Professor Choi that he used Apple Pages; and he did not have to produce the files because the Committee asked for a “Microsoft Word” file but he used “Apple Pages.”
The Honor Committee meeting ended around 2 pm. Wendy Tsung, assistant dean of the MBA for Executives program, called Rignol shortly afterward to ask for the Pages file he had mentioned. Rignol provided this around 3 pm.
Dean Tsung called him again at 3:30 pm. She texted him at 4 pm. Tsung wanted Rignol back on campus by 5:30 pm; the committee had asked to examine his laptop.
But Rignol had already left campus for the day. At 5:07 pm, he texted Tsung, “I am unfortunately not able to meet at 5:30 p.m. today.” Tsung called him 12 minutes later and reiterated her request. Rignol said that he could not return on such short notice. Would next week work?
It would not. That evening, at 8:28 pm, Rignol received a letter from Professor Choi. The Honor Committee had not ruled on the substance of the allegations, but it had found Rignol liable for “not being forthcoming”—which Yale treated as a separate honor code violation.
Rignol’s lawsuit calls this punishment a manifest injustice. “Before this point, Mr. Rignol had never received any notice from Yale that he was being charged with ‘not being forthcoming,’” it says, “nor was he afforded any of the due process protections required under Yale’s policies for such a charge. As a result, Mr. Rignol was never given the opportunity to defend himself against that charge.”
But Yale points out that Rignol had been told over the summer that candor was an issue and that he had still not provided the requested file until the day of the hearing.
Rignol was suspended for a year. In late November, the Honor Committee further decided that he had “violated the rules of the Sourcing and Managing Funds final exam” and imposed an F. Yale says this amounted to a finding that Rignol had used AI; he insists that the committee never expressly said so.
Rignol then appealed his suspension and his grade change to Yale administrators; both appeals were denied.
125 docket entries later
And so, in February 2025, Rignol sued Yale in federal court. But he has encountered some skepticism. As one judge said during a hearing, “Wouldn’t a reasonable professional person who was trying to be cooperative with a proceeding upon getting not just one email but many emails asking for the underlying document that was used to create a PDF say, ‘Oh, I didn’t use Word. I used Pages, a different word processing [program]?’”
Two years after the contested final exam, Rignol’s court case continues. In June 2026—more than a year after Rignol sued—the judge gave him permission to file a third amended complaint, adding new material. But the approval came with a sharp warning.
“This delayed motion, submitted during the pendency of a fully briefed motion to dismiss, borders on meeting the standard of ‘futility, bad faith, undue delay, or undue prejudice to the opposing party,’” the judge wrote. The court also noted it would “not grant another motion to amend the complaint absent extraordinary circumstances.”
Yale lawyers, who have been pushing for months to have the entire case dismissed, said in a motion on July 15, 2026, that the expanded complaint was “nothing more than the classic formulaic, conclusory recitations of elements of causes of actions without support from actual, well-pleaded facts.”
The final grade
In two years, the Rignol saga has morphed from a clear charge of “using AI on an exam” to a murkier fight about railroading, political bias, due process, and discrimination against non-native English speakers. Along the way, it has consumed fantastic amounts of time (and, one assumes, money).
Rignol has spent over a year in court insisting that Yale used the wrong tools, followed the wrong procedures, asked for the wrong file, and reached the wrong conclusions.
But Yale’s most damaging evidence may be simpler: For months, it asked for the file behind his exam, and Rignol did not quickly provide it.
