Encouraging Academic Integrity in the Era of AI √ §

While fostering and maintaining academic integrity has always been an important goal of instruction at UMBC, advances in “the other AI” – artificial intelligence – have complicated this effort. Students are not always aware of what constitutes plagiarism where generative AI tools are concerned. Meanwhile, faculty often feel pressure to ensure that students meet course learning objectives and also to help them learn how to use AI tools ethically and responsibly. Further complicating the academic integrity landscape, currently no single tool exists that is able to distinguish reliably between student writing and AI writing. In this session we will revisit best practices in course, syllabus, and assignment design in light of the opportunities and temptations that generative AI tools present. Faculty will also learn how to make their policies around AI use clear to students and will gain strategies for dissuading students from inappropriate use of these tools. John Fritz, Associate Vice President,  Instructional Technology, will share an approach using version control features in word processing that could aid faculty in assessing students’ use/misuse of generative AI in course papers and other text-based assignments.