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…

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…

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…

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…

This post was updated for links and terminology in October 2023. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools, such as but not limited to ChatGPT, are increasingly available with quickly advancing capabilities.  Proper and ethical use is important for transparent and valid assessment.  The following are 10 general guidelines for educators.   To prepare Learn about relevant, new GenAI technologies and their applications in contexts of interest. Discuss approaches and emerging practices with disciplinary colleagues. Design assessment to meet course learning outcomes in ways that include acceptable uses of GenAI tools and/or reduces the likelihood of unacceptable uses. During the course Explain how students should and should not complete their assessments and…

Many instructors are surprised by the capabilities of a new artificial intelligence text generator – ChatGPT – that was released in November, 2022.  Try it out . Many are asking what the right thing to do is in terms of allowing or disallowing its use. In the short-term, it is reasonable to be contemplating whether to “ban” use of ChatGPT for course assessments. In the long-term, these tools will become even better and more pervasive and our assessment practices will surely need to change.  In fact, opportunities to incorporate this tool and those like them are set to inspire all kinds of exciting changes in higher education and the world…