At the end of the term here, I'm making a few edits / updates to my syllabus policy on the use of LLMs etc., and I decided to post it in some place that's easily shareable.

Use of LLMs, “AI,” search engines, etc.

The summary of this policy is: Don't.

Your job as a student is to think. It's actually not to calculate, to follow examples, or even to get right answers (because especially in mathematics, computers are much better and less error-prone at these kinds of tasks than humans are). Homework and activities are opportunities for you to think, and to produce written records of your thinking.

My job as a teacher is to inquire into your thinking, so that I can help you learn to think more like an expert. That means that I need to see and hear your thinking – the particular thinking that you, as a human, produce yourself.

Therefore, if you submit work that was produced by any kind of computer:

  • you haven't done your job, because you haven't produced a record of your thinking, and
  • I cannot do my job, because I don't have access to what you think. (Indeed, I find it personally insulting if you ask me to read and respond to something that nobody wrote.)

Relatedly, you can certainly use a search engine to look up a reasonable answer to any question that is ever posed in this course, and you could certainly submit whatever you find as if it was your work. Again, in this case, you haven't done your job and it's impossible for me to do mine.

This policy needs teeth, even though I'm not interested in being a detective or a cop (again, neither of those things is actually what my job is). Here is how this policy is enforced:

  • I reserve the right to request, at my sole discretion, that you visit office hours to explain your thinking on any submission before I give feedback on it.
  • Any submission of work that's not a record of your own thinking is a violation of Westminster's Academic Honesty policy. I will take disciplinary actions as outlined in that policy, at my sole discretion.