AI in Higher Education
Before the rise of generative AI, various AI systems were already employed in higher education. These systems focused on tasks such as identifying at-risk students, recommending courses, boosting motivation, and predicting student performance. Your institution’s homepage might deploy a chat bot to answer questions, one of the most common uses of AI in higher education.
The introduction of generative AI has further expanded these capabilities, offering adaptive and automated assessments, personalized learning experiences, tutoring, and feedback opportunities. In higher education, generative AI is utilized across disciplines for creating content, writing code, facilitating research, addressing accessibility concerns, and restructuring writing processes. The recent development of students using AI-powered chatbots to generate essays, code, and digital art has sparked discussions on academic integrity, the evolving nature of learning, and the role of technology in the classroom.
AI & Academic Integrity
Academic integrity became the locus of concerns around generative AI upon the launch of ChatGPT (often to the detriment of other needed discussions around the use of AI in higher education). With the arrival of large language models (LLMs) has come new concerns surrounding academic integrity, plagiarism, and cheating. As Janelle Miles articulated in an early article responding to these concerns, What is ChatGPT and why are schools and universities so worried about students using AI to cheat?:
The big concern is that ChatGPT could potentially be used by university and school students to cheat on written assignments without being detected. It’s been described as akin to students outsourcing their homework to robots.
Leon Furze argues:
It is also still unclear to what extent using an AI constitutes “cheating.” It is not, strictly speaking, plagiarism as the output of the model is not copied from another source. Rather, the output is an original creation which is generated “probabilistically.” Knowing where to draw the line raises ethical questions about academic integrity and honesty.
Faculty and, in some cases, institutions as a whole, have been revisiting academic integrity policies to address the use of AI. Policies range from outright bans of the technologies to those that allow and even encourage AI usage. For example, Texas Tech University offers three Recommended Syllabus Statements for AI Use, including if AI use is encouraged and allowed in a course, if AI use is allowed only for specific assignments, or if AI use is prohibited in a course. The University of North Texas offers similar guidance: AI, Plagiarism, and Academic Integrity.
Appropriate attribution and acknowledgment of AI technologies used to create assignments and other products of learning are crucial as well. In education, AI and academic integrity are inevitably tied to intellectual property and copyright. These are discussed in more detail in Lesson 7.
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