An understandable initial reaction to genAI is the concern that students will use it to cheat – they will feed it a prompt or question (with some additional parameters or guidance) and submit work they didn’t create.
While this is a legitimate and serious concern, faculty do have influence over students’ motivation, behavior, and
Simply put, current AI Detectors don’t work reliably. For instance, Turnitin released an AI detector in spring 2023, touting a high level of accuracy, which they have since acknowledged generates more false positive reports than they originally claimed. The CTLI’s professional judgment is that there are no current tools that can confidently provide faculty with an accurate and reliable assessment of whether or not a piece of writing was composed using genAI and that the existing tools carry high risks of false positives, which undermines trust between students and faculty.
James Lang wrote the wonderful book Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty. His research indicates that humans are more likely to cheat under certain conditions and that faculty can encourage academic honesty by setting classroom conditions conducive to integrity. These principles apply to academic integrity concerns related to genAI as well as other types of cheating. And, most importantly, they also increase learning outcomes.
- Tap into students’ intrinsic motivation for success.
- Emphasize learning for mastery not performance.
- Lower the stakes.
- Set students up for a high sense of self-efficacy.
Beyond encouraging academic integrity, there are some other approaches that may minimize the inappropriate use of genAI:
- Oral assessments. Asking students to prepare ahead and then engage in an oral assessment either 1:1 with you or as part of a class activity will demonstrate a degree of individual effort. While a student could use a genAI tool in preparation, they would still need to internalize that information in order to demonstrate their learning. This handout of 16 oral assessments may spark an idea you could adopt for your teaching.
- OneDrive version history. Ask students to complete papers in Word Online through their VSC accounts and require their submission be a link to that file in their VSC OneDrive account that gives you access to the version history. The version history will show you a date/time-stamped list of when changes were made and if you compare a previous version to a newer version, you can see what changes were made. If a paper goes from blank to full in a matter of minutes, presumably content was copied into it. While that does not mean a student copied content from a website or genAI tool, it provides you with information from which to have a conversation about that students’ writing process.
- Unessays. Unessays can be used in any discipline, are usually assigned at the beginning of the semester (to give time for students to brainstorm and begin work), and allow students freedom of expression to propose a project and then create a meaningful artifact representing their learning. This blog post by Cate Denial outlines her process and provides examples of some unessays students have submitted in her history classes.
- Paper/pencil assessments. You may find it useful to use classtime to have students complete and submit paper-pencil assessments (worked problems, quizzes, exams) where you can monitor their use of outside resources.
- Two-stage exams. During a two-stage exam, students take an exam individually, first. They then take the exam a second time, but during this step, they work collaboratively with classmates in small groups of 3-5. Students can then submit a second answer sheet, either individually or collectively, after learning from one another’s ideas and logic. The students’ exam grades are usually a combination of the scores earned during the two stages with the weighting of each portion dependent on the instructor’s goals and philosophical approach (e.g., first stage 40%/second stage 60% or first stage 75%/second stage 25%).
If you would like support to implement any of these ideas, don’t hesitate to schedule a consultation with a CTLI staff member.
Review the Academic Policies section of the current Undergraduate Catalog and Graduate Catalog for the relevant policy and procedure for how to handle incidents of cheating and academic dishonesty.
- Supporting Academic Integrity: Ethical Uses of Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education Information Sheet by Jennie Miron et al.
- AI and Asynchronous Online Courses Part 2 [crowd-sourced Padlet about assessments]
- What to do about assessments if we can’t out-design or out-run AI? by Danny Liu and Adam Bridgeman