Language for Course Policies on Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Overview

Regardless of your course policies for generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), it’s important to clearly communicate those policies with students through the course syllabus and to reiterate the policies, where relevant, within individual assignment guidelines. It is also advisable to explain to students why you are implementing those policies so that they can better understand how the use or avoidance of GenAI will advance their learning.

There are many possible approaches to policies on the use of GenAI in a course. Your policies can also vary within a course by assignment or assignment type (e.g. GenAI is allowed without restriction for some assignments while on others it is prohibited).

The sections below describe potential policy types and offer examples of syllabus language for each type. If your policies vary by assignment, be sure to clarify that on the syllabus.

AI Usage Level	Description	Example
Allowed Without Restriction:	GenAI can be used for any and all coursework	Students are encouraged or expected to use GenAI tools to help foster AI literacy
Allowed With Citations:	GenAI can be used freely, but only with appropriate attribution	Students can use GenAI tools to help with a writing assignment, provided that they follow APA guidelines for in-text citations and references page
Restricted Partially:	Specific GenAI tools are allowed, or GenAI is allowed under certain circumstances	Image-based GenAI tools like Stable Diffusion are allowed for generating images for a project, but all text must be written by the student without the use of GenAI
Restricted Completely:	All assignments should be written without the use or assistance of GenAI	GenAI use in all circumstances is a violation of academic integrity

Allowed without Restriction

You may decide that the use of GenAI in your course in any circumstance will promote student learning and that students are free to use whatever GenAI tools they wish in the course, without restriction.

Example syllabus language:

You are encouraged to freely use GenAI tools in this class. In fact, some assignments may require it. When you use GenAI, no citation is required. However, keep in mind that GenAI is often limited in the scope and quality of its responses. You will likely need to enter multiple, refined prompts to ensure high quality content. In addition, you should always review and, where necessary, revise AI-generated responses for clarity, concision, accuracy, specificity, and appropriateness. Finally, keep in mind that GenAI tools are not bias-free. As with humans, GenAI can reproduce harmful prejudices and omit important perspectives. It is your responsibility to use GenAI to augment your own critical thinking processes, not to replace them.  

Allowed with Citation

You may decide that he use of GenAI in your course in any circumstance will promote student learning, but that you want students to acknowledge their use of GenAI with appropriate citations.

Example syllabus language:

GenAI literacy is quickly becoming an important professional skill. As such, you are allowed to use GenAI tools in this class as long as you provide proper citations for those tools. Before our first writing assignment, we’ll spend class time discussing both the ethical implications and strategic considerations of using GenAI tools.  

Remember that AI-produced content is essentially crowd-sourced information—it is your responsibility as a researcher to assess and evaluate the provided information to determine its credibility and accuracy. Use the information the tool provides to conduct your own further research into the issues. Whenever you use an AI tool to assist you, you should cite it. Please follow the appropriate citation guidelines  for citing GenAI tools in MLA, APA, Chicago, and Turabian Style.  

In addition, GenAI does not always produce responses appropriate for every assignment. You will likely need to use GenAI as a starting point, providing further revisions, expansions, or clarifications in order to meet assignment requirements. Ultimately, you are the final author of any compositions you put forth in this class and are accountable for their accuracy, credibility, and rhetorical usages. 

Restricted Partially

You may decide that GenAI can be used on certain assignments or for certain activities, but not others. For example, you might allow the use of GenAI in your course to generate ideas or make corrections in grammar, but you might not want students to entirely replace their own writing with AI generated content. In other cases, you might have a course where the use of GenAI is completely unrestricted on some assignments, but the other assignments or exams should be completed without the use of any AI tools.

Example syllabus language:

GenAI tools are exciting and useful, in certain circumstances. Most of these tools are based on large language models, which means that they give us access to an incredible amount of information in a very short amount of time. However, because these tools are based on a wealth of uncited information from all over the internet that, in many cases, has not been validated or peer-reviewed, these tools can also generate information that is factually incorrect, ethically problematic, or even harmful, especially when that information is consumed and shared without any kind of critical analysis. 

Outside of the guidelines provided below, I consider the submission of any work that has been created in whole or in part by GenAI tools to be a violation of academic integrity, unless you have obtained prior approval or guidance from me.   

 Acceptable Use of GenAI: 

• Using tools (like Microsoft Word’s Spell Check, Grammarly, or ChatGPT) to provide minor, localized suggestions on correcting the grammar, style, or organization of a paper you wrote yourself. (However, before you submit any of your own writing to one of these tools, I recommend that you familiarize yourself with the possible privacy concerns these actions might entail.)  
• Using tools to help you with the brainstorming stage of writing. For example, if you’re trying to figure out a topic for a paper, asking ChatGPT “what are some major issues related to environmental sustainability?” would be acceptable usage.  

 Unacceptable Use of AI: 

• Using tools to write entire sentences, paragraphs, drafts, or papers to complete class assignments, whether or not you claim that writing as your own or cite it as having come from a tool.
• Using tools to provide your citations or citing tools as a source of information themselves. For example, it’s acceptable to cite ChatGPT as a source for an assignment if you used it to help you brainstorm; however, it would be unacceptable to refer to information provided by ChatGPT as a source itself. Much like guidelines you have probably received on the use of Wikipedia, you can use these tools as a starting point, but you need to verify the information they give you and cite other sources that corroborate that information instead.  

Restricted Completely

You may decide that the use of GenAI in any way would not support student learning and/or that the ethical issues of GenAI use outweigh its advantages.

Example syllabus language:

It is vital to learn the fundamental concepts of our field without using outside aids before moving to more advanced material. Part of that learning process involves struggling on your own with difficult material without any help from GenAI. In addition, work produced by GenAI reuses information and language from external sources without citation and thus the submission of any work created in whole or in part by GenAI tools cannot be considered to be original in our course setting. I therefore ask that you do not make use of any GenAI to help complete any work in this course. The use of GenAI in this course will be considered an academic integrity violation and would be referred to the university academic integrity process. Violations could potentially result in grade penalties, such as a zero on the assignment, and/or other university-level sanctions.