AI and Academic Integrity

How are students using AI and how can we clarify expectations?

By Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning

Academic Integrity can be a challenging subject, especially since the arrival of AI. However, understanding how our students are getting their work done will help us to set clear expectations for GenAI use which will help to guide our students to academic integrity and success.

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Our students are already adapting to learning in our GenAI-enabled world. We know that our students will continue using GenAI as they live and work in a GenAI-enabled world after graduation. This means instructors should consider how their fields and disciplines will be shaped by GenAI and how this will impact their students post-graduation. What steps can instructors take to help their students use GenAI tools responsibly?

Below are six broad categories for ways that our students may be using GenAI in their learning.

To: Prompt GenAI to...
Plan Make changes to improve the clarity of their writing by proofreading and editing to help create a final draft.
Advise Suggest processes, offer solutions, identify best practices
Create Elaborate on ideas in sentences, paragraphs or entire written products, so the product is co-created by the student and the GenAI or made predominantly by the GenAI
Give ideas Suggest topics, options, or ways of doing things like a brainstorming partner
Format Structure something according to certain specifications
Summarize Identify key points and preserve meaning of a provided input or source in a condensed form 

It can be easy to panic when you consider the ways your students might use GenAI, but it’s important to remember, students have always had ways of doing these things, some of them you may have permitted or been concerned about, including:

  • To Plan and To Advise – A student can work with the instructor, TA, a tutor, or even a study buddy.
  • To Create – A tutor could do this, or as a form of academic misconduct such as the student copying notes/work from other students or paying others to make work for them.
  • To Give Ideas – Working with a study buddy to bounce ideas off of each other or searching the internet for ideas and examples.
  • To Format – Another spot a tutor or writing coach could help, students could use a paid editing servicemor use formatting guides and citation software.
  • To Summarize – Students working as a study group could break the content down into individual sections and each member of the group would become an expert on their section of the content and then bring it back to the main group to create a cohesive summary.

The main takeaway here is that students had opportunities to do these things in our pre-GenAI world. GenAI simply speeds up the process and makes it more accessible.

Instructors always have to set clear expectations for their students, but now they have to consider these uses of GenAI when setting those expectations. Here are four categories of allowable GenAI use to consider for every assessment in our course:

1) Assist Learning – Students can use GenAI to ask clarifying questions, summarize a reading, or to help find resources. Using GenAI in this way allows students to use it as a “thinking partner".

2) Improve Student Work – Students can use GenAI to help with spelling, grammar, formatting, or re-writing sentences.

3) Generate New Content – Students are using GenAI to do a portion of the work for them and then engaging with that work. For example, GenAI might make an essay/project outline, create slides for a presentation, or even create a document for the student to interact with.

4) GenAI Content and Support are Not Allowed – Instructors need to explain in clear terms what this means to their students. Generally speaking, this means that students are not intentionally opening a GenAI tool with the intent of using it to complete their work. But, students could use a different AI tool if it has no major impact on their final product. For example, it is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid AI tools and making a search with Google could be considered using an AI tool. How about EAL students, can they use AI powered translation software? Or students living with disabilities who may use an AI tool for quality-of-life improvements? Remember, the amount of AI in our world is only growing, and it is rapidly being added to common tools in our AI-enabled world.

Students have many ways, both using GenAI and not using GenAI, to get help with their assessments. What counts as academic misconduct is set by the instructor, but the expectations must be clearly laid out and explained to the students before they can start their assessments.

To take this a step further, read the next article about being transparent with GenAI use.

 

Article Series - "AI exists, now what?"

This article is part of a series that aims to assist educators understand the world of GenAI and will offer suggestions on how to bring it into learning environments, answering the question: AI exists, now what?

  1. AI is Here and You Can ACE It
  2. AI and Academic Integrity: How are students using AI and how do we clarify expectations?
  3. Being Transparent With AI Use: How To Cite, Disclose, and Document
  4. Designing Assessments that Leverage AI
  5. AI and Authentic Assessments: Preparing Students for an AI-Enabled World

Title image credit: Flicker / Levi DeWitt

This article was created with the assistance of AI tools, as described in the GMCTL AI Disclosure Statement.

This resource is shared by the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL), University of Saskatchewan, under a CC BY-NC-SA license. The image was shared by the Province of British Columbia via Flickr with a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.