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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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Generating Learning Outcomes with Generative AI
However essential we know learning outcomes to be for orienting students, articulating them can be an arduous process. Where does one even begin? Thankfully, this is one area where Generative AI’s capabilities really deliver. Using a text-producing AI tool such as the USask created tool ALDA (AI Learning Design Assistant), insert as many details about your course and the desired output as possible. Here is a sample prompt that you might submit to AI to produce course-level learning outcomes: Please create 6 learning outcomes that consider the following parameters. This is a university course at the [ordinal] year level of a [discipline] program. The course title is: “[Course title]”. The…
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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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Getting AI to Make Questions for You
You know you should make your class active. Asking students regular, low stakes questions about the key concepts, skills, and process you are teaching is essential. In a 50 minute lesson, it is great to do that 5 times. You shouldn’t grade any of the questions, and you should asks students to talk with with each other about each one. Even when you know it is important, it can be hard to do. Who actually has time? We wind up avoiding doing making active components because we are already spending so much time making slides of our content and creating assessment we then spend even more time marking. The good…
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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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Prompting Generative AI to Help You Plan for Your Class Quickly
Having a good teaching assistant (TA) can be so important. While anyone needs clear direction to grade an essay with the same criteria you use, it is incredibly helpful to have someone help carry the teaching load. Turns out that Generative AI (like Microsoft Copilot) doesn’t just force you to redesign your assessments for academic integrity reasons – with good prompting it can even help you do that redesign. It just needs the clear direction and oversight you give a TA. Learning to prompt can save you time Prompting AI is the process of giving clear parameters for what you want. When you start chatting with an AI you are…
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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…