Ohio State University's new AI initiative will likely change how students are charged and investigated for misconduct violations.
The university is now encouraging students to learn to use AI under a new initiative that will launch with the incoming Class of 2029 aiming to make students more fluent in the technology's usage. Previously, if a student was found using the technology, they were threatened with discipline.
Starting with the fall semester, Ohio State plans to embed AI education into the core of every class from computer science to agriculture. Students will also learn the ethics of using the tool.
University spokesperson Chris Booker told WOSU that the university only started tracking AI usage separately in student misconduct cases during the last academic year. In all of the more than 2,000 cases heard that year, only four were specifically related to AI.
Ravi Bellamkonda, Ohio State's provost and executive vice president, spoke Tuesday on WOSU's All Sides with Amy Juravich about the AI initiative. He said the new initiative means many uses of AI will not qualify as a violation of student conduct codes.
"All cases of using AI in classes will not be an academic integrity question going forward," Bellamkonda said. "There will be prescribed and permitted and encouraged... uses of AI within the classroom to further the understanding of that discipline."
Bellamkonda said this doesn't mean they are forcing faculty to use AI in their classrooms and permit it. He said that professors will now have leeway to choose whether students can use AI on assignments and exams.
Ever since the chatbot ChatGPT launched in Nov. 2022, educators have raised concerns it could facilitate cheating. Ohio State is one of the latest academic institutions to take a different approach by trying to teach students to become fluent in the technology's usage.
Bellamkonda said students will have to follow the rules professors set in their courses. He said OSU wants to signal that using AI is not uniformly bad if it is in the service of what a student is learning.
"If indeed a student can produce high quality work with the assistance of some technology, why not produce high-quality work? As long as we know how to harness it, and we're still meeting the learning objectives of understanding our field," Bellamkonda said.
Some Ohio State educators have raised concerns about the new AI initiative, but expressed hope that AI could turn into a tool in some fields akin to what the calculator became for mathematics.
Bellamkonda said if a professor says AI can't be used for a course, but a student uses it anyway, that could still be a case of academic misconduct needing to be addressed.
