It is important for instructors to have a policy in place, included in their syllabus, to help students understand what ethical engagement with GenAI will look like in your classroom.
As a reminder, all syllabi statements and AI usage should align with the CCS Artificial Intelligence Institutional Statement and your department’s AI statement. Check with your department chair for your AI policies or visit the linked departmental policy below:
Graduate Departments
Considerations for Your Course AI Policy
- GenAI should enhance, not hinder, learning.
- Students should be transparent about how they use GenAI and adhere to standards of academic integrity.
- Instructors should distinguish between allowed and disallowed uses of GenAI, including how, when, and why GenAI may (not) be used.
Course policies have tended to fall into one of three categories:
- The Menu Approach: Policies that encourage specific uses of GenAI (generating ideas, editing, translating, outlining, etc.)
- The Process Transparency or Technical/Coding Approach: Policies that allow GenAI to be used if students clearly distinguish their original work from the GenAI output (e.g., by highlighting the GenAI outputs or keeping a detailed record of what prompts were used and how they changed the activity).
- The Human-Only Approach: Policies that state that any use of GenAI constitutes academic misconduct.
This third policy is the most difficult to perfectly enforce. Instructors who choose this route should be prepared for situations where they suspect AI use but lack actionable evidence.
In designing your policy, think carefully about what consequences you want to commit to. As Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the academic-integrity office at the University of California at San Diego, points out in this article on GenAI and academic integrity, instructors who commit to a policy of giving students an F for using GenAI sometimes find, when the student explains their reasoning, that they no longer want to fail the student. Consider allowing yourself space to be flexible.
Whichever policy you choose, the most effective way to ensure integrity when it comes to AI is to move the focus away from the final output and toward the learning journey.
GenAI Syllabus Statement Examples
The following are real syllabus statements from various institutions. Use these examples to help you craft a syllabus statement that works for your classroom.
Example 1 – The Menu Approach
Use Case: Best for courses that want to allow AI for prep work (like brainstorming or grammar) but not final outputs.
The use of generative AI tools (e.g. Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Dall-e, etc.) is permitted in this course for the following activities:
- Brainstorming and refining your ideas;
- Fine tuning your research questions;
- Finding information on your topic;
- Drafting an outline to organize your thoughts; and
- Checking grammar and style.
The use of generative AI tools is not permitted in this course for the following activities:
- Impersonating you in classroom contexts, such as by using the tool to compose discussion board prompts assigned to you or content that you put into a Zoom chat.
- Completing group work that your group has assigned to you, unless it is mutually agreed upon that you may utilize the tool.
- Writing a draft of a writing assignment.
- Writing entire sentences, paragraphs or papers to complete class assignments.
Example 2 – The Process Transparency Approach
Use Case: Best for courses that want to treat AI as a professional collaborator by requiring students to document and justify their process.
Any and all use of machines that emulate human capabilities (Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, DALLE, etc.) to perform assignments or other works in the course should be disclosed (this includes all graded deliverables as well as other course works and activities). In addition, an explanatory appendix is required for each and every unique usage to describe in clear steps how such a machine was used, including which machine, iteration, editing, etc. WARNING: the current state-of-the-art of machine capabilities have two salient features: 1) the quality is such that more work may be required in an AI-assisted mode; 2) it is feasible to discern the presence of “AI fingerprints.” Our goal as a community of learners is to explore and understand how these tools may be used to augment human performance. However, violation of the explicit disclosure requirement may subject students to standard academic integrity processes (for reporting, determining misconduct (if any), and assigning sanctions (as appropriate) as would be employed for any other type of potential Academic Misconduct).
Example 3 – The Technical / Coding Approach
Use Case: Best for technical or digital production courses where the student must remain accountable for the logic and functionality of AI-assisted code.
In principle you may submit AI-generated code, or code that is based on or derived from AI-generated code, as long as this use is properly documented in the comments: you need to include the prompt and the significant parts of the response. AI tools may help you avoid syntax errors, but there is no guarantee that the generated code is correct. It is your responsibility to identify errors in program logic through comprehensive, documented testing. Moreover, generated code, even if syntactically correct, may have significant scope for improvement, in particular regarding separation of concerns and avoiding repetitions. The submission itself should meet our standards of attribution and validation.
Example 4 – The Human-Only Approach
Use Case: Best for foundational courses where the learning objective is the development of a specific skill or creative voice without the aid of an algorithm.
Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and other similar technologies are advancing rapidly and there are many instances where they will be key tools in your schoolwork and career. For the purposes of this class, we are asking all students to pledge that they will not use these technologies. We believe this is key for this learning environment because we want you to learn how to critically engage with the material we’ll be discussing, including learning how to search for and identify relevant sources, synthesize these materials, and make recommendations without the aid of technology. Artificial Intelligence cannot do this learning for you. Students who are found to have used GenerativeAI or the like to complete their assignments will receive a grade of zero for that assignment.
Additional AI Resources
Once you’ve set the expectations in your syllabus, the next challenge is showing students what that looks like in practice. Review our resources on Modeling Behavior and Teaching Citation for AI Usage for more information.