You may need to discuss using AI tools in a variety of contexts, including learning materials and campus, collegiate, and course policies related to academic integrity. Consult with your collegiate leadership about specific policies. In any case, providing transparent information about expectations for student use of AI tools and how these expectations align with course goals and scholarly values is crucial.

Remember that with any policy in your syllabus, it’s important to have ongoing conversations throughout the semester. 

Some example language:  

• When AI is prohibited. [This course] assumes that work submitted by students—all process work, drafts, low-stakes writing, final versions, and all other submissions—will be generated by the students themselves, working individually or in groups. This means that the following would be considered violations of academic integrity: a student has another person/entity do the writing of any substantive portion of an assignment for them, which includes hiring a person or a company to write essays and drafts and/or other assignments, research-based or otherwise, and using artificial intelligence affordances like ChatGPT. (Excerpted from ChatGPT by University of California: Irvine Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation)
• When AI is prohibited. Since writing, analytical, and critical thinking skills are part of the learning outcomes of this course, all writing assignments should be prepared by the student. Developing strong competencies in this area will prepare you for a competitive workplace. Therefore, AI-generated submissions are not permitted and will be treated as plagiarism. (Sample statement shared by Chrissann Sparks Ruehle, with permission for others to use, on Higher Ed Discussions of AI Writing Facebook Group on 1/6/2023, cited in ChatGPT Resources by Texas Tech University Teaching, Learning & Professional Development Center)
• When AI is allowed with attribution. In all academic work, the ideas and contributions of others must be appropriately acknowledged and work that is presented as original must be, in fact, original. Using an AI-content generator (such as ChatGPT) to complete coursework without proper attribution or authorization is a form of academic dishonesty. If you are unsure about whether something may be plagiarism or academic dishonesty, please contact your instructor to discuss the issue. Faculty, students, and administrative staff all share the responsibility of ensuring the honesty and fairness of the intellectual environment. (Excerpted from Constructing a Syllabus: A Checklist by Washington University in St. Louis Center for Teaching and Learning)
• When AI is allowed with attribution. Use of AI tools, including ChatGPT, is permitted in this course for students who wish to use them. To be consistent with our scholarly values, students must cite any AI-generated material that informed their work and use quotation marks or other appropriate indicators of quoted material when appropriate. Students should indicate how AI tools informed their process and the final product, including how you validated any AI-generated citations, which may be invented by the AI. Assignment guidelines will provide additional guidance as to how these tools might be part of your process for each assessment this semester and how to provide transparency about their use in your work.
•  When AI use is encouraged with certain tasks. Students are invited to use AI platforms to help prepare for assignments and projects (e.g., to help with brainstorming or to see what a completed essay might look like). I also welcome you to use AI tools to help revise and edit your work (e.g., to help identify flaws in reasoning, spot confusing or underdeveloped paragraphs, or to simply fix citations). When submitting work, students must clearly identify any writing, text, or media generated by AI. This can be done in a variety of ways. In this course, parts of essays generated by AI should appear in a different colored font, and the relationship between those sections and student contributions should be discussed in cover letters that accompany the essay submission. (Based on Course Policies related to ChatGPT and other AI Tools by Joel Gladd) 

For more, Ryan Watkins, professor of Educational Technology Leadership, and Human-Technology Collaboration at George Washington University, offers suggestions to update your course syllabus and assignments.  

Students may have access to a variety of resources like calculators, Wikipedia, peers, hired tutors, and increasingly, AI tools to accomplish their course tasks and assignments.  

Instructors are encouraged to engage in discussions with their students about Iowa’s policy on Academic Misconduct. Students benefit from transparent instructions about which tools and resources they can appropriately leverage in their work (e.g., Winkelmes et. al, 2016). They will also need guidance on how to cite or acknowledge the tools and individuals who contributed to their work. Although a policy in a course syllabus is a good way to start these conversations, the syllabus shouldn’t be the only time that the policy is discussed.   

The Office of Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center for Teaching's Handbook for Teaching Excellence provides additional information on promoting academic integrity. 

Some instructors may want to incorporate AI tools into their assignments so that students develop the skills necessary to interact with it in the future. Depending on course goals, potential assignments could include:  

• Developing a question that will effectively elicit an AI-generated response that meets certain specifications.  
• Comparing/contrasting AI-generated text with other scholarly work. 
• Evaluating AI-generated text for missing or biased information.  
• Using AI to generate examples or proofs of concept (Warner, 2022).  

Like any technology tool, it is important to consider questions about student privacy, availability of technical troubleshooting, and accessibility prior to requiring use by students. Instructors can request consultations on the availability of alternative tools or alternative assignments for individual students who may not wish to use AI tools.   

Some instructors may be interested in preventing the student use of AI tools in their assessments. This may be a difficult task as Beth McMurtrie points out in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education’s Teaching Newsletter, “If you want to make your assignments AI proof, that’s impossible," (McMurtrie, 2023). 

Effective assessments are closely aligned to course goals and allow students to demonstrate their learning in authentic ways. Assignments that are focused on the specific learning of the course and students’ own learning are also less suited to being written by AI or by another person who is not participating in the course.  

Consider: 

• Developing a specific prompt that requires students to leverage information learned in the course, including materials on ICON and in-class discussions.  
• Scaffolding the assignment to include several stages, such as a proposal, an outline, a rough draft, and a final draft. Depending on other factors, such as course size, an instructor might be able to include opportunities for students to receive and comment on peer/instructor feedback at these stages. 
• Including a metacognitive component in which students describe their research and writing process, what they learned from it, and how they would approach a similar task in the future.  
• Focusing assessments on current events and recent scholarship not yet included in the AI training data set. 
• Exploring how an AI responds to your assignment prompt. 

It is not recommended to simply replace existing high-stakes assignments with graded, hand-written, in-class assignments. This may have unintended consequences for students who use technology to provide accommodations and other legitimate assistance in completing coursework. (CRLT, 2022). 

The Office of Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center for Teaching's Handbook for Teaching Excellence provides additional information on how to develop authentic assessments.

While there are several tools being developed to detect the use of AI in student work, it's important to remember that these emerging technologies are likely to be an imperfect solution. 

• GPTZero: a new AI program developed by Edward Tian, a student at Princeton University, to detect if text was generated by ChatGPT.   
• Turnitin: a plagiarism detection program that can be connected to ICON to review online assignment submissions.
  • Chris Caren, CEO of Turnitin, recently stated, “We will incorporate our latest AI writing detection capabilities—including those that recognize ChatGPT writing—into our in-market products for educator use in 2023” (Caren, 2022).  

Skepticism of detection tools includes University of Mississippi instructor Marc Watkins's widely quoted assertion that, “We should be proactive in our response and not approach our teaching out of panic and mistrust of our students. What message would we send our students by using AI-powered detectors to curb their suspected use of an AI writing assistant, when future employers will likely want to them to have a range of AI-related skills and competencies?” (Watkins, 2022).  

Additional Resources from OTLT

• SITA video using Open AI
• EdTech Tips in 10 Podcast Episode 23: ChatGPT featuring Claire Frances and Giovanni Zimotti 

Perspectives from University of Iowa instructors

• Blaine Greteman, "ChatGPT Can Write Better Essays Than My College Students. That’s a Good Thing."
• Claire Frances and Giovanni Zimotti, "Robots vs. Humans: Does ChatGPT Pose a Challenge to Second Language Writing."

Articles from January 2023

• "ChatGPT Advice Academics Can Use Now" from "Inside Higher Ed"

You can find several robust (and evolving) lists of further reading exploring this topic, including the University of Toronto’s Artificial Intelligence in Teaching & Learning bibliography or this Zotero list started by Lee Skallerup Bessette. 

On Jan. 5, we asked ChatGPT to "write a newsletter article that explains what ChatGPT is to an academic higher education audience and address limitations of the tool, how faculty should approach concerns relating to ChatGPT with their students, and essay assignments in a course."  

Here is the article ChatGPT produced (in about 30 seconds):  

"ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art language generation model developed by OpenAI. It is a variant of the GPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) model, which was trained on a massive dataset of internet text. The model has been fine-tuned to perform well in a variety of natural language processing tasks, such as text completion, question answering, and conversation generation. 

One of the key advantages of ChatGPT is its ability to generate highly coherent and coherently human-like text. This makes it a useful tool for a wide range of applications, including automated customer service, chatbots, and content generation. However, ChatGPT is not without its limitations. One major concern is the model's tendency to perpetuate biases present in the data it was trained on. Additionally, the model's proficiency can be challenged with certain tasks that require specific domain knowledge, or tasks that are more abstract or open-ended. 

Given these limitations, faculty should approach concerns related to ChatGPT with their students by highlighting its limitations as a tool and encouraging critical evaluation of the text generated by the model. In the context of essay assignments, faculty should give students guidance on how to properly cite and credit the model's generated text, and also stress the importance of original thought and analysis. 

It is also important to keep in mind that ChatGPT is a machine learning model, it is not a substitute for human creativity and critical thinking. And that while it can be a useful tool, it should not be relied on too heavily, especially when it comes to assignments that require original ideas, analysis and creativity. 

In short ChatGPT is a powerful NLP language model that can generate human-like text, but also has limitations, such as biases and lack of domain specific knowledge. As educators we should teach our students to use this tool critically and responsibly, stressing on the importance of original ideas, analysis and creativity.”