Could you get away with using it to write your coursework?

If you’ve had any emails from your university administrators recently, it’s probably been about their rules on using an AI chatbot to write your coursework and assessments. 

Universities across the country have been stamping out the use of the tool to prevent cheating, with services such as the submissions platform Turnitin even developing their own AI to detect its use in students’ work.

The artificial intelligence tool can pull information from all over the internet on almost any subject and based on its understanding of billions of words, can now mimic human speech.

Understandably, many universities are at odds with how the technology should be used, if at all as it takes away from students forming their own thoughts and opinions, as well as handling all of the legwork out of coursework and assessments with a computer essentially able to do it for you.

Oxford University has stated that students must still be “authors of their own work”, however, it can still be used for study purposes. 

This means that the tool has essentially been prohibited for use in any form of assessment, as the university spokesperson told i news, “Content produced by AI platforms, such as ChatGPT, does not represent the student’s own original work so would be considered a form of academic misconduct to be dealt with under the university’s disciplinary procedures.”

This means that the tool can’t be used by students to write coursework or any other type of assessed work, however, the tool’s use has not been banned entirely.

On the other hand, some universities see the tool as an exciting new tool that students can leverage in their understanding of topics that would have previously taken hours of research to pull together.

University College London (UCL) has gone as far as to include guidelines on their website for how to use the tool to write long and laborious bibliographies or references and believes that the tool has the capability to be “transformative” if used correctly.

They’re not alone either — Edinburgh and Glasgow University are also looking into ways it can be used in university assessments while maintaining integrity.

There’s no doubt that as the AI chatbot tool continues to develop that it’s only going to throw up more questions for universities as they try to monitor its use in assessments, but for now there’s definitely a clear split between the teaching establishments that condone its use and those who don’t.

Before you use the tool in your exams, be sure to check your university’s policies and be aware that these rules could change at any time as new information emerges on whether it can be used transparently and in a way that truly benefits students.