ChatGPT and Its Implications for Your Teaching

Under Penn’s Code of Academic Integrity, students may not use unauthorized assistance in their academic work. It is up to instructors to decide what that means and let students know. While some instructors may consider any use of AI-assisted work to be an academic integrity violation, others may allow students to use AI-generated content in particular instances, such as part of brainstorming, to inform revisions, or for a particular assignment. Some may allow students to use ChatGPT as long as they disclose their use of such tools. Therefore, it’s important to be clear what the policies are for your class or for particular assignments or activities if it will vary.

You should include your policy in your syllabus and on Canvas, such as: 

• You are not allowed to use ChatGPT (or tools like it) for your work for this class. Using such tools will be considered a violation of Penn’s Code of Academic Integrity and suspected use will be reported to the Center for Community Standards & Accountability. Please contact me if you have any questions about this policy.
• You may use ChatGPT and other AI assistants for your work in this class but you must contact me for permission first so we can discuss how you plan to use these tools and how you will indicate their use in your work. If you do not first request permission, using such tools will be considered a violation of Penn’s Code of Academic Integrity.

You will also likely want to address this in class, especially when introducing new assignments or projects.

Being transparent with students about the purpose of an assignment, can help students appreciate what they are learning, the importance of the skills they are developing, and the excitement of creating their own ideas.

Seeing what the tool produces can help you think about what you’re assigning to students – and what an AI-generated response might look like. Consider sharing what you’ve found with students. Pointing out any issues you’ve seen regarding the quality and accuracy may help students better understand these tools and their limitations (both for their classwork and beyond).

There are lots of efforts to develop effective means of detecting AI-written prose, but at present it is not clear how effective any will be. Nevertheless, you can try running student work through the plagiarism-detection tool in Canvas, Turnitin. According to Turnitin’s blog, Turnitin can currently “detect some forms of AI-assisted writing” and they plan to roll out additional features to improve detection in the coming year.

As always, though, assignments should ask students to practice or demonstrate the kinds of thinking you want them to develop.

Consider taking into account ChatGPT’s current limitations. You might ask students to:

• Cite their sources, even in informal work. If prompted for sources, ChatGPT has been known to make-up sources that do not exist.
• Incorporate or engage with ideas from particular sources or discussions from class. In particular, articles, media, and other content that requires a login or subscription will likely not be accessible to ChatGPT.
• Respond to visual materials. ChatGPT cannot yet interpret images.

Consider designing assignments that make students’ thinking and their process of doing the work more visible. You might ask students to:

• Submit notes they took on sources to prepare their papers or presentations. This is particularly easy to introduce mid-semester, when you first discuss an assignment.
• Show their work in progress or submit components of assignments in steps prior to the final deadline, so you can see the development of their ideas or work over time. This might include submitting an outline, a list of sources, an explanation of their approach, or a first draft before the final product. 
• Write briefly about a source they decided not to use and why they did not.
• Talk with you briefly about their essays, explaining their thinking beyond what is written. If the class is small, you might do this with the whole class. If it is large, you might tell students you will hold these conversations with some of them once you have seen their papers.
• Present their learning using different modalities throughout the class: in addition to written work, students might also submit slides or presentations, video or audio recordings, or infographics.
• Draft group work and other collaborative projects in tools like Google Docs where you can see version histories and the development of the work over time.

Consider policies that give students some flexibility when they fall behind in class or the option to revise and resubmit certain assignments when they don’t do well. This may make students less tempted to turn to AI tools when they get behind or worry they are unable to perform at their best.

The Center for Community Standards & Accountability (CSA) can field questions without opening a case. Visit Reporting Academic Integrity Violations to learn more about the Reporting and Disciplinary Process.