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How to talk to students about using AI for homework

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My relationship with AI in education has been a stormy one- I started off with lots of suspicion towards ChatGPT (I wrote about it here), then I got enthusiastic about it thanks to Twee (more in this post), now it is time to deal with its academic integrity repercussions, as I was informed of a student using ChatGPT to write a whole essay for them. 

Luckily for them, it was not part of internal or external assessment, just homework. Yet, it definitely was a breach of both school and IBO Academic Integrity Policy(to be found here), as well as  policy on using AI (linked Here), and as such, required urgent attention and action. 


As this was the first case of such misconduct, DP1, and not coursework, the student was not reported to the IB, only penalized according to our school rules, which is an F, a letter to the parents, and lowered grade for behaviour. 


What also had to happen was a talk to the whole cohort during homeroom where this issue was addressed.

I decided to refrain from giving the class a bitter lecture or elaborating in length on IB penalties applicable (though it was tempting) - instead, I tried to appeal to the students’ sense of integrity, fairness and well-meant self-interest. 


Here is a letter to students with list of arguments used that you might find useful as well, should you need them (touch wood!)



Dear student! 

Here is my message to you regarding the use of AI in class, especially to write papers.


  1. AI, ChatGPT especially, is a useful tool to help the learners construct their knowledge, as it may do research, summarize articles, provide guidelines and examples. It will and should be used to the benefit of the learner as long as it is acknowledged as a source and does the work with you, not for you or instead of you. When you use it to do your work for you, it is not a learning tool any longer, it is a tool of deception, theft and forgery. It is an accomplice in your criminal activity.
  2. When AI does the whole assignment for you, you learn absolutely nothing. Let’s be honest- you never even read it before handing it in. Learning things on your own and for yourself should be the ultimate goal of education. AI will not be there for you in the exam! What is the use of cheating with it now, scoring high now and then failing miserably in the actual exam, because you will not know how to eg write an essay in a group 3 subject? It is fooling yourself, fooling your parents and your peers who often struggle to learn things and manage things on their own, score lower but never resort to cheating. At the end of the day the only intelligence you can rely on is your own, not the artificial one. 
  3. When AI writes things for you it usually produces a generic piece that is not devoid of mistakes and totally unaware of the assessment criteria for this particular task, resulting in a paper that sounds ok upon first glance, but when assessed against specific criteria eg TOK essay rubrics, scores as low as 1-2, because of the generalized content. 
  4. AI is a game-changer in education, and that is a fact. Yet it might change the game not for the better but for the worse, as it forces teachers to stop being ‘the guide on the side’ in a student-centered education where relations matter, and adopt the role of a policeman/investigator. Once we need to play the ‘policemen and thieves’ game, our classroom interactions are no longer about learning, they are about controlling, suspecting, checking and investigating. I don’t know about you, but personally I don’t want to be a part of such game, never signed up for it, I don’t enjoy being the policeman on a case of academic integrity breaches. I don’r want to spend my time running your papers though still new plagiarism checks.
  5. School is about learning new things, making mistakes and learning from them, not about impressing others with your inflated, dishonest results. If you persist in using AI to write your assignments for you, at the end of the day we will need to switch to all papers written in class under teacher supervision, which is a waste of precious classroom time. You might say- ‘yey no homework!’, but that means no more time for project work, groupwork or presentations during classes, or simply learning by doing, as a lot of time will be devoted to writing in class the things that are normally written at home as preparation for your IAs and exams.

Hope I got you convinced that using AI to do things instead of you is short-sighted, morally wrong, works 

against you and spoils the fantastic game of education we are playing together:) I am enjoying it, hope you are too- let’s not ruin it. 


Sincerely yours 

Teacher 

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