EDITORS' CORNER
Some schools ban AI while one professor encourages it
Beginning this fall, social science Core classes at the University of Chicago will be “technology-free” and will prohibit both students and instructors from using artificial intelligence.
“The classroom is a device-free space. Put away laptops and cell-phones. The use of wearable AI (such as Meta glasses) during class is also prohibited,” a Social Sciences Collegiate Division memo obtained by The Chicago Maroon reads.
It further states that while practices have historically varied among courses according to professors’ discretion, “sequences are collectively designed to be taught as ‘analog’ courses” moving forward. This means students will read and write primarily on paper.
“[I]n the SOSC Core we first equip students to read, write, and think without dependence on AI, just as we equip students to read, write, and think beyond the bounds of conventional views or leading ideologies,” the memo states.
It also bans “AI-assisted grading” and mandates that all syllabi be written by a human.
The new policy does, however, allow professors to cautiously “experiment” with AI in their classes as long as they consult divisional leadership.
The University of Chicago Law School has also banned phones, tablets, and laptops during class beginning this fall. The ban aims to promote “essential human” skills in response to artificial intelligence, The College Fix previously reported.
In addition to banning electronic devices, the school is requiring all tests to “be in-class without access to the internet, electronic files, or apps.”
The University of California Berkeley School of Law is doing the same.
Beginning this summer, students at the school are banned from using AI to complete coursework or exams. They cannot “conceptualize, outline, draft, revise, and edit their work” using AI, according to the new policy.
But some professors are taking a completely different approach.
Kyle Saunders, a professor of political science at Colorado State University, wrote in a post on X that every assignment in his class is either “AI-encouraged with required disclosure or AI-prohibited (the in-person exams).”
He added that “Disclosure is never penalized.”
In a recent Substack post, he wrote that he decided to encourage the use of AI for some assignments because a prohibition doesn’t “actually produce a class that isn’t using AI.”
“It produces a class where some students are using it, quietly and undetectably, and others aren’t because they took the rule seriously. That splits the class in two, and it splits in exactly the wrong way,” he wrote.
Saunders added that the students who don’t use AI have an unfair disadvantage, “and their integrity functions as a handicap.”
“That’s the kind of policy that makes no sense to me. Punishing the conscientious and rewarding the willing to chance it is a bad policy, whatever its intentions,” he wrote.
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