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Update to Student Code of Conduct for Generative AI Tools
What has changed?
The Student Code of Conduct in the Student Handbook has been updated to reflect inappropriate usage of generative AI tools in the definitions of Cheating and Plagiarism. The new language is reflected below in the bold, red text.
Cheating is defined as fraud, deceit, or dishonesty in an academic assignment, or using or attempting to use materials, or assisting others in using materials that are prohibited or inappropriate in the context of the academic assignment in question.
- Allowing others to do an assignment or portion of an assignment for you, including the use of a commercial term-paper service,
- Inappropriate use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to generate content as defined by course instructions
- Purchasing test solutions and sharing test solutions in a public area
- Wrongful reuse of work
- Collaborating on an exam or assignment with any other person or AI provider without prior approval from the instructor,
- Doing academic work for another person and allowing that person to represent the work as their own
Plagiarism is the adoption or incorporation of another's ideas without proper attribution of the source.
- It is more simply defined as taking the writings of another person or people or content generated by an Artificial Intelligence provider and representing them to be one's own
- Plagiarism may include text mining, defined as weak paraphrasing or combining content from other authors whereby the ideas of the original author(s) are not clearly or formally documented
- In addition, it is plagiarism to keep the same sentence structure and change a few words without providing proper attribution of the source
- To avoid plagiarism, all should follow the accepted practices of academic writing when summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting
What is Generative AI?
Generative AI is a type of AI that can make new content based on what it learned from datasets of examples and interactions with humans. Humans give GenAI models prompts to create the original content, including natural-sounding language, images, audio, or video. This broad term includes chatbots like ChatGPT, GPT-4 (OpenAI), Bard (Google), or LLaMA (Meta), as well as digital image generators like DALL-E or Midjourney, which generate images based on natural language prompts. These models are trained on large datasets of examples which they use to generate new content in response to prompts.
What is the takeaway message?
Work you submit in your classes must be your own original work. Submitting work that was created by a generative AI tool and claiming that work is your own violates the Student Code of Conduct.
All sources you use, including a generative AI tool, must be cited appropriately in your work.
What does this change mean for my classes?
Please read course instructions carefully. Some courses may allow or encourage you to use generative AI tools for specific educational purposes or specific assignments. The instructions will indicate when these tools may be used and for what purpose. If you are uncertain, please check with your instructor before using a generative AI tool and be prepared to document any allowed usage, such as providing the prompts and transcript of an interaction with the tool.
How can I prepare for this change?
It is good practice to save drafts of your assignments, copies of or links to your sources, and any outlines or notes that you have made in case you need to document the process you used to produce your paper. If a faculty member suspects that your answer was inappropriately derived from a generative AI tool, they may ask you to provide drafts of your work to substantiate the process you followed.