Overview

The use of AI tools has become prevalent, and it is important that as educators we consider when and how their use can enhance learning and when it is best to limit their use. Learning how AI tools are used in your field may enhance your ability to incorporate AI into your classroom in productive and meaningful ways and guide your thinking on when and how to prevent its use when appropriate.

Course Policies Related to AI Use

It is at the discretion of each faculty member to determine when and how AI can be used, if at all, in their courses. The course expectations related to AI use should be clearly and repeatedly explained to students (see more information in the section below). We suggest utilizing the attached icons (discussed in more detail below) to easily indicate to students the AI-related policies of your course.

We encourage you to consider how students will use AI to complete assignments and consider developing assignments that cannot be easily completed with the use of AI. Assignments can focus on skills and values that AI cannot such as creative thinking and problem solving rather than memorization or reiteration of content. You can also consider creating assignments and projects in courses where the use of AI will not be useful and where students build community, practice team building skills, innovate and express creative thinking. Faculty could also consider requiring students to submit drafts of written work at multiple stages and/or write their assignments in a program that has tracking (e.g., Google Docs).

While not all courses and assignments will be able to adjust to some of the suggestions above, it is important to consider how you can creatively incorporate or discourage this in your courses through assignment creation.

Syllabi and Assignment Statements for AI Use

It is strongly recommended that your syllabus and assignment instructions clearly articulate the course policies for the use of AI. This provides clear direction for students who might otherwise assume that policies in a different course automatically transfer to your course. These expectations should also be discussed in class. See Guidance for Syllabus Statements for AI Use, which includes examples from OSU faculty. You can download AI icons as a Word doc, then copy and paste individual AI icons and their descriptions into your syllabi and into assignment instructions to easily indicate to students the policies for the course and assignment related to AI use. To provide consistency for students, we highly recommend using them on your syllabi and all assignment instructions for quick student recognition.

You may consider adding a statement of integrity prior to submission for your assignments. For example, students may need to check a box upon submission saying they didn't use AI to generate their assignment, or they used AI as a tool as allowed by course policies, but they did not plagiarize content from AI.

Per OSU policy academic sanctions for academic misconduct are determined only by the College Hearing Officer, not the faculty. Thus syllabi should not specifically articulate any grade sanctions for academic misconduct. The Hearing Officers decide any potential formal determination of responsibility and sanctions through the academic misconduct process.

Academic Misconduct with AI

If course policies around AI use are violated it is possible that academic misconduct occurred. Academic misconduct related to AI use may fall into one of the following 3 categories:

Cheating - The use of AI as a study aid or resource without prior, explicit authorization for faculty.
Plagiarism - Representation of the work of AI as their own without proper citation.
Falsification - Fabrication of information from a source that does not exist.

If faculty have a situation that constitutes a violation of the Code of Student Conduct and academic misconduct related to AI, faculty may choose to discuss the situation with the student and provide a warning or assignment resubmission for the same point value, or proceed with an academic misconduct case submission if it is deemed that an academic penalty is warranted.

Faculty, not hearing officers, are required to provide convincing evidence for any misconduct allegation. AI detectors [ZeroGPT, GPTZero, etc.) do not constitute proof of AI use. They often confirm biases. As such, OSU rejects detectors as reliable indicators of AI use. A high AI probability score does nothing more than encourage additional scrutiny. Convincing academic misconduct allegations involving AI must include evidence such as the following:

The topics discussed in the submission are not topics covered in class or part of the course.
The answer for the submission does not directly address the prompt.
The answer for the submission is vastly outside of the guidelines of the prompt (e.g., word count too high, writing style inconsistent with expectations, etc.).
The submission is highly similar to a response generated by AI when the assignment prompt is entered in AI.
Citations provided are fictitious.

Resources for Faculty

The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) has a Canvas site with information and guidance for faculty related to AI, including information about syllabi statements and AI use.
The Ecampus website has guidance for AI use in the online classroom.
The University of Sydney has produced an excellent public Canvas course for students, built by students, about AI in education.

Finished here?

Return to OSU-Related AI Information and Statements.