From Academic Dishonesty to Academic Integrity
Establishing the culture for an AI policy
In a presentation to high school students in a Research Methods class at the start of this year, I shared a photo of two students: one holding out a test, and one looking at the test while writing. I asked which “one” of the students was committing academic misconduct, the students correctly answered “both.” They correctly explained that the student copying answers was presenting someone else’s work as their own and that equally at fault was the student providing the answers. Happy with their answer, I quickly moved on to a discussion of academic integrity. The students reiterated their answer that academic integrity was about being honest. Yet, despite my prompting, they said nothing about learning.
And that’s when I wondered if my school had failed these students.
Looking back, I realized that most talk at my school warned students against plagiarism. My school’s family handbook has a section titled “Academic Honesty” that offers positive concepts such as “honesty,” “responsibility,” and “ownership,” yet the longest section spells out various forms of “academic misconduct.” Surveying the history of rules, Lorraine Daston concludes that “norms work far better than explicit regulations in achieving the desired results” (168), yet our teacher talk and our policies all spell out what not to do. My students have learned the rules of what not to do, but my conversation suggested that we had been less successful in developing their understanding of why to be honest.
A Culture of Learning
The International Baccalaureate advises schools that academic integrity is not just about honesty but “must be part of the teaching and learning process.” I take that to mean that every time teachers challenge students with an inquiry or a question, we expect that their work will help them learn: the student struggling to write a research paper is learning how to gather ideas and the student struggling to tie a science concept to a specific example is learning how to apply ideas. Or, to use the example I have shared with students, when a classmate says “I don’t understand the question, can I copy your answers?”, academic integrity is not just about keeping the classmate honest, it is about encouraging the classmate to go to the teacher to ask for support to learn how to use a specific concept.
Stephen Taylor, in his post “We Don’t Need an “AI Policy,” argues “When working on assessment, particularly with high stakes, it is more important than ever to erase the invisible middle between ‘set-and-get’. Challenges will appear, and problems will arise but they might likely be less critical in classroom and school cultures that take a coaching and mentoring approach to ideation, drafting, feedback and submission.” Taylor articulates a culture where students are used to working with teachers, likely seeing the value of producing work as a combined effort in which learning happens. In other words, academic integrity should include the commitment not just to honesty, but to learning, which reduces the temptation to use AI, or any other shortcut.
Similarly, Matt Johnson and his students combined to create an AI policy that I think builds a culture of academic integrity while acknowledging this transformative technology: “Generative AI is a new and rapidly evolving tool. As such, you must discuss the ways you are thinking of using AI (if you are thinking of using it) with me in advance of using it. If you use it (after talking with me), you will also be required to document and share how you used it with me.” Together, Johnson and his students have articulated a policy that builds a culture of learning: when students have questions about using AI, they approach their teacher to discuss the use of AI. In this formulation, student and teacher “open up a dialogue so we can learn to navigate the shifting and unclear labyrinth of this new technology together.”
Compare these models with an incident that occurred at my school last spring. Following a musical performance, students were asked to write a brief reflection on how they performed and what they learned from the concert. One student was caught using AI to generate their reflection. For the student, this request was just one more product to submit for a grade: not only were they dishonest, but more importantly they did not see the value of reflection as a learning opportunity.
Problem/Solution
When ChatGPT first emerged, my first instinct was that we needed more rules, specifying what not to do. But to quote Dalton again, “regulations are … always reactive, issued in response to glaring abuses” (155). The temptation to ask AI to write something for them is there for my students, but they will not learn anything from my imposing more regulations with stricter enforcement; instead, I believe that they need me to teach them how to use AI and to provide them a culture in which learning is the central value. In my next post, I will detail my school’s efforts to commit to such a culture.
