In the era of artificial intelligence (AI), it is almost foolhardy to imagine an industry or an aspect of everyday life where AI has not made itself present. Included in the exhaustive list of all the things AI is creeping into, is college education.
It started with ChatGPT, a generative AI that could create an entire writing assignment in seconds. Joining ChatGPT, other chatbots such as Microsoft’s Copilot or Anthropic’s Claude have been put to similar uses.
“We have this generative AI. We all have discussions about how we should involve the students,” Professor of Computer Science Dr. Jingwen Wang said. “Should we allow them to use it, or should we prevent them from using generative AI?”
The response from colleges has straddled the line between outright prohibition and cautious embrace. Most institutions leave it up to individual professors to decide how and when it is appropriate to use AI in their classes.
“I have not yet provided students an assignment on which they can use AI officially,” Professor of Education Dr. Kathryn Caprino said. “Though I acknowledge that it seems we all use AI in some fashion even when we may not think we are using it.”
Elizabethtown College’s Standards of Academic Integrity lists AI as a potential form of plagiarism but also notes “both appropriate and inappropriate uses of such tools in assignments.”
“I currently ban AI usage in my classes,” Professor of English Literature Dr. Patrick Allen said. “I want students to grow in my courses, especially as critical writers and thinkers, and I don’t currently see AI use as compatible with those goals.”
Ultimately it is up to professors to approve or disapprove of student’s use of AI on their assignments.
“My policy is that students can use AI as a brainstorming or other collaboration tool, but that all their work must be authentic,” First-Year Writing Adjunct Shannon Brenner said. “If they do use AI for a phase of a writing project, they need to provide attribution so I can understand how they collaborated with it.”
For college professors, it is more of a question of when, not if, their students will use AI sanctioned or unsanctioned.
“I believe that students will use AI whether it is allowed or not. I think that the most important issue is integrity and communication,” Director of Music Therapy Emily Frantz said. “I am also curious about ways that students find AI helpful.”
For some fields of study, such as computer science, it makes sense to allow students to acquaint themselves with the next stage of the industry once they have been properly introduced and understand the fundamentals.
“For first-year students, [their assignments] are just basic questions. It’s very easy to have generative AI come up with a solution,” Wang said. “If we’re talking about a higher level like junior, senior students—this is a different story. I think we need to prepare them for their future job.”
For other fields, there is a lack of necessity for AI augment learning or instruction, such as with the humanities.
“In English literary studies, I do not currently see many benefits to AI use,” Allen said. “I worry students will think because what AI produces often looks good, that it is good. It rarely is.”
Even with the supposed benefits of AI, in many cases the technology is imperfect. A frequent occurrence is AI “hallucinations” where the program will make up information.
“When you are trying to ask [AI] the most recent news or are trying to ask some very complicated question, AI is not going to be able to answer those questions simply because it is not actually intelligent,” Wang said. “It is just using the training data to predict the answer.”
Whether AI will become a permanent fixture remains to be seen, but for now college classrooms will have to adapt.
“As we continue to learn more, I think benefits and downsides that we are not yet thinking about may emerge,” Caprino said. “I know that there is a range of opinions about AI on campus, and it varies based on academic disciplines, professional expectations for AI usage after graduation, and a host of other factors.”
