Instead of banning AI, I made a classroom contract with my students

From ScienceMag:

I sat in the heavy silence of my office, waiting for an undergraduate computer science student whose academic path I was about to derail. I had noticed a glaring red flag in his final report for my class: It answered questions I hadn’t even asked. It was clear that artificial intelligence (AI) had invented details to fill the gaps. My student had presented a chatbot’s output as his own work, and I could not accept that. But the meeting that was about to take place made me realize a flat ban on AI use was not the answer.

I had worked with earlier forms of AI for almost 2 decades. After a Ph.D. in computer science, I moved to the private sector, teaching machines to catch financial fraudsters and optimize marketing expenditures. Yet, I never left the classroom, teaching two courses at a local university. I felt confident I was preparing my students for the future.

My dual career in tech and academia felt safe and rewarding. Then generative AI rewrote the playbook. Suddenly, I wasn’t just designing software to assist humans; I was watching technology threaten to bypass human input entirely. AI could now generate complex code in seconds. A machine was claiming intellectual territory I had thought was mine.

For the first time, my career path felt like an anxious race to outrun my own obsolescence. So I adapted, spending hours integrating new generative AI tools into my daily routine to summarize emails, draft documents, and automate tedious coding tasks. It wasn’t just professional upskilling; it was self-defense. But in the classroom, I maintained a strict no-AI policy.

At this crossroads, the student I intended to fail walked into my office. He didn’t try to hide that he had used AI to generate much of his assignment. Instead, he admitted his anxiety. He felt that mastering these tools was essential for his future career, yet he had no idea how—or even whether—he was allowed to use them. The more we talked, the more I saw my own doubts mirrored in him. My indignation gave way to a nagging sense of hypocrisy. I used AI daily—how could I expect my students to avoid it entirely? Outlawing AI had felt comfortable—a neat wall built to preserve a familiar order. I hid behind rigid rules because I was terrified to admit the ground beneath my academic feet had shifted.

Instead of failing the student, I gave him a chance to rewrite his report. But as the office door closed behind him, the full weight of our encounter settled on me. I realized that instead of building higher walls, I needed to dismantle them.

At my next lecture, I projected a blank screen onto the wall and invited my students to negotiate an “AI contract.” At first, they were guarded, but as I shared my own experience with AI, the classroom dynamic shifted. We stopped playing cat and mouse and became partners. Students opened up about their AI use and began to ask questions. After some debate, we drew a line separating mechanical churning from actual thinking. Automating repetitive tasks or literature searches was acceptable. Bypassing critical analysis was not: System architecture and design would remain strictly human tasks.

I have since made cocreating an AI contract a standard part of my classes. I moderate the discussion, but a consensus always emerges naturally. Although the terms differ slightly for each class, the contracts all insist that critical analysis should remain human.

The challenge of AI has prompted me to make other changes as well. Since the release of ChatGPT, student reports have grown steadily longer. I often felt I was evaluating a machine’s capacity for volume, not a student’s capacity for insight. So, I now limit written papers to two pages and base students’ grades more heavily on oral discussions of their work, which allows me to probe their thought process and challenge their decisions.

After doing these things for four semesters, I’ve seen benefits beyond reducing AI use. Defining the AI contract has become a powerful icebreaker, creating a collaborative atmosphere. The short reports force students to synthesize their knowledge, and oral defenses sharpen their argumentation skills.

Our real duty as teachers has always been challenging students to think. The task now is finding ways to engage them in the painful, essential work of critical thinking in a world where machines are willing to do it for them.

Read More