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Determining Levels of Acceptable GenAI Use
Many instructors are contemplating what level of GenAI (e.g., ChatGPT) use is acceptable for students when completing their assessments. Instructors who have tried the tools have seen how well they can generate text in response to a prompt or request. It concerns them that they will not be able to tell when a student has completed an assessment with or without this kind of assistance and the validity of assessment will become uncertain. If you’re new to GenAI, read these posts: Need to learn more about ChatGPT New! USask Enterprise GenAI New module added to academic integrity tutorial Students are gaining more experience with these tools and looking for…
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Identifying Plagiarism
Preventing academic misconduct is always better than policing it. But, sometimes you notice a problem and wonder if the work you are marking was really created by or fully authored by the student who submitted it. It is your responsibility, according to the academic misconduct regulations to follow up judiciously with your concerns. Educator judgment It is important to keep an educator’s mindset. As the instructor, you are the most likely to be able to identify academic misconduct. This is because you are most closely connected to: the student and the course, the purpose of the assessment, and the instructions given to students about acceptable and unacceptable processes. It is…
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Identifying ChatGPT Text-based Plagiarism
General plagiarism identification advice applies to ChatGPT text-based plagiarism, too. Read this post for more on possible plagiarism flags. You may have heard about detection tools but they are not reliable, recommended or approved for use. Read this post for more on current limits of these tools. Read this article about how ChatGPT can be prompted to beat the detection tools Read this post for more on how our academic misconduct regulations may apply. ChatGPT is less about accuracy and more about generating responses indistinguishable, linguistically, to what humans would produce. This means much of what ChatGPT produces seems like work we would attribute to our students. There are some…
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Things to Tell New USask Students about Final Exams
There are many unstated or rarely stated norms and practices associated with the final exam setting. New students need to learn the ropes. This is especially important for students who are: writing their first university exams because they are new to university study (like first year students), new to USask (like transfer students), new to Canadian higher education (like international students), and/or returning to USask after only a COVID-based experience of remote exams. It’s a good idea to reduce uncertainty and to avert distress during exams. What can you do? Tell students what to expect and explain what is expected of them in the conditions for the final exam. Double…
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How to Talk with Students About Suspected Academic Misconduct
Faculty and instructors follow up with suspected academic misconduct and when we do, we show we care about students and their learning the validity of the assessment the fairness of grades for all students in the course. When we don’t follow up, there are risks for students. If students are not made aware of their errors that constitute academic misconduct, they may make the same errors again. If students are aware of their academic misconduct, but there are no consequences, they may risk it again. If other students see that academic misconduct goes unaddressed, they can lose confidence in the fairness of the assessments. Talking to an individual student…
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ChatGPT Detection Tools – neither approved nor recommended at USask
Within weeks of the release of ChatGPT, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) detectors were claiming to be able to identify the text it produces. However, a growing body of research has found that these detection tools are not effective. Even the company that created ChatGPT (OpenAI) abandoned their detector in July 2023 due to its low rate of accuracy. Consequently, such tools are neither approved nor recommended for use at the University of Saskatchewan. Here is what recent research has demonstrated about the lack of efficacy of these tools: 1.) They are unreliable – False positives can lead to false accusations False positives occur when a detector concludes that text was…
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New Module on GenAI added to Academic Integrity Tutorial
The Academic Integrity Tutorial has a new addition entitled Understanding Generative AI which focusses on the ethical and responsible use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in university. ChatGPT is one tool among thousands that fall under the GenAI category. This means there are now 4 modules that each take about 45 minutes to complete (a total of about 3 hours for most students). Module 1 – Understanding Academic Integrity Module 2 – Understanding Generative AI Module 3 – Developing Skills that Prevent Academic Misconduct Module 4 – Understanding Your Rights and Responsibilities The open version of the tutorial as always, is available on the Library’s website. Each end-of-module quiz…
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Recommendations for Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence
These recommendations were provided in June 2023 in response to a request from Deans to provide guidance to the campus community with respect to ChatGPT – a generative artificial intelligence tool that can produce content that is difficult to distinguish from that produced by humans. Some links and terminology were updated in July 2023 and in October 2023. Advice in this area is evolving and questions and suggestions are invited for future updates of this resource (contact susan.bens@usask.ca). * On May 1, 2023, the European Network for Academic Integrity (ENAI) published recommendations on the ethical use of artificial intelligence in education. The ENAI recommendations are summarized, paraphrased, re-ordered, and grouped below,…
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Need to learn more about ChatGPT?
Are you looking for a comprehensive and digestible introduction to Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)? GenAI is the term in use now for the category of machine learning tools that ChatGPT falls under. A new module titled “Understanding Generative AI” has been added to the academic integrity tutorial. It is a recommended resource for both student and faculty. Check out this resource by Sidney I. Dobrin and download the free 37 page pdf booklet that provides a helpful overview of the technology, speaks to the academic integrity and misconduct challenges, and suggests strategies for the new context. In the section on pp. 18-19 under the heading “Assignment Design in the…
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Make your “ChatGPT” and other GenAI expectations clear
Links and terminology were updated October 2023 Students want to know what your expectations are. Sometimes students feel uncertain about what to ask or how to ask. Students learn quickly that different instructors, in different programs, handle and regard some things differently when it comes to rules for academic integrity. The reasons for this can relate to discipline, to learning outcomes, to assessment type, and to the philosophy of the educator. The syllabus and any information posted alongside assessment details are excellent “placements” of clear expectations. Here are some pointers and resources: A link to the USask syllabus information suggested language related to permitted or unpermitted use of…