New Faculty Orientation Student-facing Policies and Example Assignment

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Deciding upon which AI policy you want to adopt in your courses and adding a syllabus statement (like the examples from the previous page) is just the first step. We encourage you to communicate your AI policy choice with students, as well as consider the following points raised below. The second half of this page includes considerations for types of assignments which either encourage or discourage the use of generative AI and advanced automated tools.

Talking with Students

If students are allowed to use these tools, faculty should be able to help students understand:

How to cite or acknowledge the use of these tools. Some major style guides and publishers have provided updates or advice about how to cite these tools in scholarly texts: APA, Chicago, and MLA (ChatGPT and Dall-E). Faculty can also require students to adopt other practices such as a more broad acknowledgement e.g., “Some text and ideas in this document were created or edited using Chat-GPT3.”
How to effectively use these tools. Like all other tools, these tools have affordances that support and encourage some uses and discourage other uses. These are in part shaped by their limitations but there are many other considerations such as the nature of the data that were used to create the tools and the kind of output they were designed to create. Experience with similar tools suggests that some of these tools may be most useful in (a) generating ideas and (b) suggesting potential improvements or changes to existing material. However, this is an area of rapid growth and development so this may involve a genuine partnership with students to discover some of the most effective and ethical uses.
The limitations of these tools. The current generation of these tools are very limited, sometimes in ways that are not obvious to novice users. For example, the current generation of Chat-GPT cannot perform synthesis of sources or even document the sources that were used to create its responses. So it may be useful for idea generation or generic recommendations but it has no ability to creatively and independently generate new insights and make novel connections. These tools may also produce information that is incorrect or biased so students must ensure that material they submit or share has been verified with appropriate sources and is reasonably free of biases.
Ethical issues related to the development and use of these tools. There are many challenging, important, and unresolved ethical issues related to the use of these tools that should be addressed. How should their use be documented? In what situations should these tools not be used? How do we reconcile the complex issues of copyright and intellectual property, not only of the material that is generated but also the material that was used to create the tool? How do we grapple with the environmental costs of these tools?
The closed and commercial nature of many of these tools. Many of these tools are developed and hosted by companies who do not disclose many important details about the data they have collected or require to use these tools. This extends to the requirements for registering or using some of these tools e.g., phone number, e-mail address.

“Computational thinking” is one of UD’s General Education objectives, the set of skills and knowledge that we expect all UD undergraduate students to attain through their educational experience. Meaningfully addressing the use of these tools – probing their limits, exploring their ethical uses, and meaningfully integrating them into practices – in the context of a specific course or discipline can be a very effective way of helping students build computational thinking skills and knowledge (Martín-Núñez, et al. (2023) explicitly supports this hypothesis).

Examples of Assignments

The widespread accessibility of these tools – they are mostly free, easy to access, and easy to use – may motivate many faculty to reexamine assignments and activities to ensure they take into account students’ potential use of these tools. That can include an explicit incorporation of these tools or a design that implicitly dissuades students from using these tools. Further examples are included below in the “Resources” section.

Dissuading the use of advanced automated tools

Courses that do not allow the use of these tools may want to modify assignments to ensure that students cannot easily use these tools. This may most easily be done by understanding and addressing the weaknesses of these tools – no ability to synthesize, lack of the specific context of a particular class and discipline, difficulty providing genuine sources, etc. Modifications to assignments that may dissuade the use of these tools:

Focus on analysis of sources and information. The current generation of tools cannot engage in in-depth, meaningful, and sustained analysis that incorporates and references multiple sources. For example, instead of asking students to write an essay, write an essay yourself or provide them with an essay and ask students to provide meaningful, substantive critique and feedback that specifically references not only the essay but also course materials (thanks to Michael Bugeja for making this suggestion).
Require students to explicitly reference and use materials – vocabulary, concepts, references, etc. – from your course in the assignment. In many cases, these materials are not accessible to these tools; in particular, your course notes and the discussions you have in class are not part of the data sets used to develop these tools.
Place a greater emphasis on the writing process. For example, in addition to requiring a bibliography you could also require that students include a brief note for each source that specifically indicates how they used it or how it substantively influenced that specific paper.

Incorporating the use of advanced automated tools

Courses that allow the use of advanced automated tools may want to focus on improving students’ use and understanding of these tools or at least helping them have a clear understanding of the ethical and effective uses of these tools. Below are some examples of assignments that might help students develop a deeper understanding of these kinds of tools. Before incorporating these tools into assignments, however, you should consider whether all students can access these tools and how they access them e.g., is it ethical to require students to give a company their phone number and e-mail address when the university has no relationship with that company or assurances that information will be protected or ethically used?

Have students enter a course-specific prompt and analyze the quality of the response using course materials. Are there factual errors in the generated text? Where does the generated text differ in its interpretation of sources from your course materials?
Assign students multiple uses of the same tool and ask them to compare those different uses. For example, ask students to (a) begin answering a complex question by posing it to ChatGPT and using that to inspire their own writing, (b) begin answering a complex question by posing it to ChatGPT and continue editing and refining that response, and (c) begin answering a complex question on their own and then use ChatGPT to modify and refine the text that the student initially drafted. Afterward, ask students to compare the different approaches. Which seemed most helpful? Which took the most time and work? Which produced the best answer to the question(s)?
Provide students with opportunities for written reflection on their use of these tools in the service of their learning. What was useful? What made their learning more difficult? Would they use the tool again for a future assignment? What are the costs and benefits of using such a tool? Would the tool be useful to use outside of coursework e.g., in a professional setting?
Assign students two different documents to read and compare, one generated with an AI tool and one published in your discipline, about the same topic. Include all of the available context and supplementary materials e.g., references, footnotes, bibliographic data. Ask students questions to compare the documents. How were the two documents written, edited, and published and how did those processes shape the documents differently? Does one appear more trustworthy or useful? In what situations might one document be “better” than the other?

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