The following represents the opinion of the student reporter and does not represent the views of Loyola University Maryland, the Greyhound, or Loyola University’s Department of Communication.
As the semester begins, the temptation to take the easy road by plugging your entire syllabus into ChatGPT and having it pop out your homework for the next four months is enticing.
I understand it. We are college students that have a million other things we would rather be doing than writing a 10-page essay on a Saturday night, but studies have shown that ChatGPT usage to complete assignments results in less engagement across 32 areas of the brain and continued use resulted in lazier behavior. The reality is this is killing higher education.
If we are all throwing our hands up and allowing a robot to do all the work for us, there isn’t any actual learning happening; we are circumventing the entire purpose of college. If everyone around you is earning the same degree as you, but using AI to do their work, does your degree mean anything?
This question was answered back in 1990 when Loyola students, faculty, and administrators created the Honor Code in response to an article by the Baltimore Sun which negatively portrayed students cheating on exams. The Honor Code would be used to prove that they were going to hold each other accountable, to uphold the value of their degrees.
Kayne Weir ‘26, a member of the Honor Council, is concerned with the increased usage amongst students.
“It makes things easier, but the point of college, of course, and the point of working for a degree means easiness isn’t really part of the equation. I’d say the main reason someone wants to use AI is to get by, and that’s quite a problem,” he said.
Weir’s work on the Honor Council, he claims, has increasingly dealt with AI over the past two years. While he said the point of the Council is not punishment, the importance of addressing AI has not been lost.
“Myself, administrators, moderators, and other students who do work with the board, we kind of view it as one of the highest, you know, offenses you could make, or one of the highest slacking moments you can have, probably,” he said.
The point of attending a liberal arts university is to become a well-rounded person, especially at Loyola, where it is baked into our core values. The usage of AI is against the Honor Code in that the product is not from one’s own mind and is inherently against the university’s core value of Academic Integrity and Honesty.
Weir argues that degrees earned through AI use are also affecting the value of degrees earned by others, even if they haven’t used AI.
“A degree earned by a machine diminishes, like, the degrees earned by other people actually working hard during their time here, the time, effort, blood, sweat, and tears, as I like to say,” he said.
Professors are on the frontline of what seems to be a shift in higher education as a whole due to AI. Navigating this cannot be easy, and I commend them for putting up with students using AI to get through assignments, yet another concern they have to deal with when grading work.
Katie Wollman, Associate Teaching Professor of Communications, shared an experience from her public speaking course last semester, in which a student used AI.
“It’s pretty easy to tell, especially with public speaking, you get to know someone’s voice, like, when it’s not their voice, it’s pretty obvious,” she said. “So we sat down and looked at it together, and I sort of asked some questions, and I was kind of giving opportunities for them to let me know that it was not written by them, and the subtle approach wasn’t really working. Maybe after about 20 minutes, I was just like, ‘Hey, did ChatGPT write this?’ and they were like ‘Yeah.’”
Wollman then took this as an opportunity to improve her own course, explaining that when this happens, she reevaluates its structure. This includes reviewing the assignment to see whether they may have contributed to the student’s decision to use AI rather than moving towards punishment.
“When we jump there immediately, we’re missing an opportunity to actually like analyze the value of content that we’re presenting to our students, and so I think it’s an opportunity to look in the mirror and say, ‘Well, what are the shortcomings of my class?’” she said.
As part of her class last semester, Wollman utilized ChatGPT to generate examples of speech techniques as well as organization of her own ideas for lesson plans.
“I identify as someone who experiences, like ADHD symptoms, and so one of the things that I struggle with is that I have a lot of ideas and it’s really hard for me to execute them. And so sometimes what I have found is that ChatGPT gives almost like an organizational partner,” she said.
This usage of AI allows her to spend more time focusing on improving student’s learning experiences, she said, as she doesn’t have to spend as much time on administrative work. Yet, she also expressed concern that student’s critical thinking ability and their own brain function are being impacted by using the tool.
This begs the question: Is there space for AI usage in the classroom?
Emily Dillon, Associate Teaching Professor of Writing, likened AI’s rise to that of the internet in terms of what it means for education.
“When the internet came into being, a lot of faculty teachers at the time had a lot of concerns about students just finding things on the internet, not knowing how to research. So I’m trying to think about it within that realm of this is a thing of my hands to control culturally,” she said.
Dillon believes that it is the responsibility of educators to coach students on how to use this tool, including educating them on the concerns of its usage, including academic integrity and the environmental impact.
Her courses, Writing 100, are composed mostly of first year students. To manage this rise in AI, she splits the course in half, the first having no AI usage while the second they are permitted to use it.
“I am not worried about my students using generative AI because I’ve sort of created a framework for when we’re going to use it and when we’re not going to use it. And I find that students understand when and how to use it as part of the course,” she said.
AI is used in multiple portions of the writing process for Dillon’s class, yet, according to her, students have found that the drafting portion of their essays are not done effectively by AI.
“It’s the most helpful for them in all the stages other than the drafting. It’s helpful for outlining, it’s helpful for researching, it’s helpful for brainstorming, it’s helpful for, you know, revising sentences, or even like inputting the rubric to make sure that they’ve met all the directions,” she said.
The incorporation of AI into Dillon’s classroom also includes a written reflection on how the tool was used and a requirement to source all information provided by the bot.
The value of using AI in the classroom, according to Dillon, goes beyond writing papers and extends into the world beyond university.
“This is something completely out of our cultural control and it’s just something that everyone will be using regardless of environmental concerns, regardless of all of these things. It becomes necessary that we have explored the ethics of it together, so that students can make conscious, critical decisions about how and if they want to use it, so like that’s my primary goal,” she said.
Dillon’s approach of reflection on AI usage throughout each stage of the writing process, I believe, is a well-intentioned attempt at navigating such a confusing time.
However, the value of conducting your own research, making your own outline, and brainstorming ideas on your own cannot be understated. Completing each of these steps of the writing process makes us better writers and critical thinkers, and by replacing it with AI, we risk stagnating the growth of our own skills or thinking abilities.
Dr. Martin Camper, Associate Professor of Writing, offered a different perspective on the future of AI usage outside of the classroom.
“I think it could also work in the reverse once limitations of AI become more evident to people, more evident to employers,” he said. “I tell my students, you know, my prohibiting you from using AI is not because I think you’re not going to use it when you go out into the real world, but the people who are going to keep their jobs are the people who can think without it, who have developed their minds, their thinking skills, the reasoning skills, their reading skills, and their writing skills.”
Camper also pointed out that there could be a problem with non-uniform policies on AI within departments, as classes are meant to build on each other. The expectation is that you are learning certain skills in each class that build on each other, and if AI is circumventing some of those skills as you’re entering a class that does not allow AI, it creates a problem.
That being said, Camper believes there are applications for AI in the classroom through experiential inductive learning, which means gaining knowledge from objects, data, or experiences.
“I think there’s a way with experiential inductive learning, I think that [AI] has its place. I do think there are applications for it, but you need to probably be more advanced than people think you need to be to use it well, because again, you have to evaluate its output, you have to know when it might be wrong, you have to be able to know what you want right there, all these other things that actually require some level of knowledge,” he said.
There is space in education for AI, and comparing and contrasting your work from an AI bot, as Camper pointed out, can be used as a learning experience. Yet, this is a specific principle that has educational value, and we as students should be above using a chat bot to write our essays or complete our work that AI usage has not been explicitly permitted on.
When we as students think about our degrees, we think about its value, what it means to earn it and why we want it in the first place. If we believe that there is a value in getting this education and the work put into it, then we have to hold each other accountable like the Loyola students did in the 1990s and refuse to use AI when it’s not permitted.