Concerns About Student Use

• Discuss academic dishonesty
  • At the beginning of the quarter, carve out time for robust discussions about academic honesty, integrity, and ethics; such discussions will help students understand the importance of their own work in response to course engagement. Make sure they are familiar with the University of Denver Honor Code.
  • Update your syllabus policies
  • Be very clear about your expectations regarding students’ work. Consider syllabus statements indicating whether and how AI tools can be used. Review Dr. Joel Gladd’s Policies Related to ChatGPT and Other AI Tools and the Classroom Policies for AI Generative Tools document for sample policies across disciplines and institutions.
  • We’ve added a section to our Sample Syllabus Statements page about AI tools with local examples. Have one you’d like to share? Email it to otl@du.edu.
• Think about your course and assignment structure
  • Provide multiple incentives for active learning throughout the course. Instead of relying exclusively on a final project, such as a term paper, assess student learning throughout the course through using formative approaches in addition to summative ones.
  • As much as is possible given class size, get to know your students’ writing styles. For instance, you could ask them to produce a reflection, submitted via Canvas, at the beginning of the quarter that asks them to discuss their familiarity with the subject matter of your course, as well as their goals or concerns. Canvas discussion boards or low-stakes, in-class writing prompts are other ways to learn about your students’ writing styles.
  • Write specific prompts that asks students to synthesize knowledge and make connections among various ideas, sources, disciplines, etc. ChatGPT struggles with details and making connections among ideas.
• If you do suspect academic dishonesty
  • Don’t rely on AI checking software to confirm your suspicions. Although Turnitin and other companies have programs that check for AI-generated writing, many of these programs are, at best, in their earliest stages, or at worse, unreliable.
  • Instead of assuming the worst and demonizing the student, take the time to have a conversation. If AI tools are banned in your class, consider requesting that the student visit you in office hours (this is a tactic that you may already implement with other forms of academic dishonesty which would also work for violating an AI policy). Ask the student about their writing process; get a sense of how the student developed their ideas. Then, you can ask the direct question about the use of AI. Depending on how the student responds, you can decide how to proceed based on your course and/or department/program policies. Also, visit the Student Rights and Responsibilities (SRR) Faculty and Staff Academic Integrity Resources webpage for further information on DU processes related to academic misconduct.
  • If you suspect that more than one student has used an AI tool to complete an assignment, use class time to have a broader discussion about the uses and misuses of AI tools; reiterate your course and department policies as well as the guidelines of the DU Honor code. webpage

Writing Center

• For faculty interested in incorporating AI into writing courses or assignments focused on writing skills, what advice would you offer?

  Our best advice to faculty is to be transparent about how you are asking students to use AI in their writing. We’ve talked with so many students who aren’t sure what the limits are. Having not only a clear policy in writing but also class time to discuss that policy can make a real difference in students’ understanding of how to use AI.  

• What resource(s) and/or classroom approaches have you found most valuable for leveraging AI in writing?

  We’ve seen a few students working on “before and after” kinds of assignment: write a response to a question and save that response; ask AI to edit the response and look at the results; analyze the difference between the “before AI” and “after AI” paragraphs, and turn all three pieces in. This kind of assignment can help students to see what kinds of concrete interventions AI is making in their writing while also helping faculty to see students’ original texts and process clearly. In the end, both faculty and students are learning.

• When considering the use of AI in and its impact on writing courses or writing-heavy assignments, what is one potential challenge or cautionary aspect to be aware of?

  We’d ask faculty to consider when and how AI may flatten individual voices, cultural markers, and linguistic diversity. AI might, for example, remove idioms from a student’s home culture, or metaphorical language, in the service of clarity; or edit “accented” writing; or change grammatical constructions that may be correct in context but don’t match a certain convention. We hope faculty will talk with their students about these kinds of changes and—most importantly—ask students to edit their own work after using AI, including rejecting some of the changes that AI might have made. There are students who take even the most routine academic writing  seriously, understanding it to be not just a task but their unique expression, a marker of their education, and we’d say they should be encouraged to have their own voices come through in their written work.