✨Guide: How Professors Can Discourage and Prevent AI Misuse

Welcome to AutomatED: the newsletter on how to teach better with tech.

Each week, I share what I have learned — and am learning — about AI and tech in the university classroom. What works, what doesn't, and why.

In this Premium edition, I present a guide for how to discourage and prevent AI misuse, at least as things stand late in the summer of 2023.

Over the past six months, we have been testing take-home assignments for our AI-immunity challenge — experimenting with them to see if we can crack them with AI tools alone in an hour or less. We have been testing our own assignments, experimenting with all sorts of AI tools, and reading about others’ methods online and in our learning community. We have been researching AI detectors. We have been thinking seriously about how to design assignments to encourage AI use, as well as how to design them to prevent AI misuse. We have been consulting with professors about how to build their courses. We have been collaborating with educational researchers to learn more about best practices for oral assessments and in-class dialogue.

In this piece, I build on these experiences to present a comprehensive guide to discouraging and preventing AI misuse by university students. Much of what I write is intended to be general and somewhat timeless, but I do expect some of the relevance of this guide to diminish as time goes on — this is my perspective of things stand late in the summer of 2023.

I am often told by professors that they would appreciate a zoomed-out take on this issue, rather than a piecemeal or partial approach. Here it is, with the main options available to professors at the present moment.

🖼️ The Big Picture

There are six broad strategies you can take to discourage and prevent AI misuse by students on a given assignment:

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