Policy on Student Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Academic Work

Generative Artificial Intelligence (“GenAI”) poses both great opportunities and great challenges for the field of higher education. Tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, DALL-E, Perplexity AI and Grammarly are having a profound influence on teaching and learning.

WilmU encourages responsible experimentation with GenAI tools, but there are important considerations to keep in mind when using these tools, including risks to information security and data privacy, copyright issues, the trustworthiness of the content they generate, and academic integrity. The implications of using GenAI for your own learning are equally relevant. It might be possible to use this technology to complete some class assignments while doing little work yourself, but short cutting the process of thinking and writing in this way would rob you of the learning you came to WilmU to experience. At its best, GenAI can be like a tutor or thought partner with unlimited time to help you learn – but it should not be used to do the work for you, or your own learning will be greatly diminished.

The following guidelines aim to ensure that, in your academic work at WilmU, you use GenAI when it can help you learn and not in place of learning. Your instructors will clearly communicate their course-specific expectations regarding the use of GenAI in each course’s syllabus. If you have any doubt about whether a specific use of GenAI is permitted for an assignment or course, you are responsible for discussing it with your instructor prior to using it.

Unless otherwise specified by your instructor, you may not use GenAI to create all or part of a submission for a course (e.g., a paper, memo, presentation, or short response) and submit it as your own. This rule is part of WilmU’s Academic Integrity Policy, which can be found in the Wilmington University Student Handbook. Under that policy, you may not ask another person to complete your work for a course. You may not copy from something someone else has created or re-write in your own words something someone else has written, without proper attribution. The same rules apply to the use of AI. The consequences of unauthorized use or misuse of GenAI will be administered in accordance with the academic integrity violation process outlined in the Student Handbook.

Permissible uses of GenAI in WilmU coursework include seeking clarification on concepts, brainstorming ideas, or suggesting language to express your own ideas. For instance, it is fine to use AI-powered web searches and to have “conversations” with tools like ChatGPT to help you explore ideas, refine your thinking, identify examples, and better understand course material. It is also acceptable to use GenAI to draft emails to instructors, students, and others in the WilmU community that are not being submitted as coursework.

For any permitted use of GenAI tools, you must acknowledge and document that use in your assignment submission by explaining what tool(s) you used, prompts you provided (if applicable), and how you integrated the output into your work. If you cite directly from the tool, use proper citation format to credit the source. Your instructors will indicate in a course’s syllabus what citation format to use.

Keep in mind that the information provided by GenAI tools like ChatGPT is generated by calculating the probability of which word should follow the previous one based upon its training on massive datasets, the tool itself does not and cannot think in the human sense. GenAI tools can produce false claims or “hallucinations” and will regenerate any biases in the corpus of texts on which they were trained. You therefore should not trust the information as if it were equivalent to published research. You are ultimately responsible for the accuracy of the work you submit.

The use of GenAI may also have implications for the protection of your own intellectual property. For example, if you upload your own original content to a GenAI tool, that content may become part of the tool’s models, which others may encounter and use. Conversely, if you use GenAI to develop your own original work, it may unexpectedly include others’ copyrighted material.

Certain uses of AI also infringe on copyright laws applicable to U.S. universities or contravene existing expectations for student conduct in WilmU courses. Students may not upload any substantial course content, including text, video, readings, discussion-board pages, or audio recordings, to a GenAI tool.

It is forbidden to make your own recording of any course meetings, with or without AI tool integrations or AI enhanced recording devices. If you require AI technology as part of an assistive technology solution to enable you to participate fully in the course, you must contact the Office of Student Accessibility Services.

New ways of teaching and learning will emerge as GenAI becomes increasingly ubiquitous and robust. We thus anticipate that this policy will also evolve, with feedback from students and instructors.