The College could soon be taking steps to better understand students’ ChatGPT habits, as it contemplates AI ethics, usage and literacy on campus. In an effort to address confusing boundaries regarding appropriate AI use, Vice President for Academic Affairs Andrew Pilat ’25 has recently been advocating for the inclusion of required AI policy statements in course syllabi. Pilat also hopes to plan faculty panels and AI literacy workshops for the Kenyon community this spring.
Pilat was spurred to address AI policy after serving as a student member on the Academic Infractions Board, a subcommittee of the faculty Committee on Academic Standards. In this role, Pilat gave his perspective on student cases involving academic misconduct, such as cheating or plagiarism. Many of these cases involved AI. “Really its usage, ideas of what’s allowed, what’s not allowed and how we should think about this going forward,” he said.
Pilat asserted that there is a lack of consensus on campus regarding when AI use becomes dishonest. “AI usage at Kenyon comes with inherent risk because we haven’t decided how we feel about it, or we’ve not even talked about how we feel about it. I think that students see it as a tool, and in a lot of ways are using it as a tool,” Pilat said. “I also know faculty members who use it as a tool and see it as a tool, but I do think that there’s a disagreement about the boundaries.”
At Kenyon, students who are accused of committing acts of academic dishonesty with AI often receive a Tier 1, Tier 2 or Tier 3 infraction. According to the College, a student may receive a Tier 1 infraction if they demonstrate a “minor” or “careless” use of information from AI-generated texts, a Tier 2 infraction if they use “unauthorized sources, resources or assistance” from AI when completing their assignments and a Tier 3 infraction if they do so repeatedly or extensively.
While a Tier 1 infraction serves more as a cautionary warning than a formal violation, students who receive a Tier 2 infraction can face consequences such as failure of the course or prohibition from leadership positions, Greek affiliation, varsity athletics, off-campus study or other extracurricular opportunities. Students who receive a Tier 3 infraction could face suspension or expulsion.
Pilat believes that the current lack of explicit AI policy on many course syllabi has contributed to breakdowns in communication between students and faculty. “Maybe students are using AI in a different course, and they don’t necessarily know with this other course where the boundaries are,” Pilat said. “So it becomes a question of: ‘How much risk am I willing to put into this?’”
This concern has driven him to advocate for revisions to the anatomy of a syllabus, which is an outline provided by the College that includes mandatory and recommended sections of a course syllabus. For example, some of the required aspects of a syllabus are the inclusion of a course description and expectations for homework and out-of-class instruction time. Some suggested components for a syllabi include guidelines for classroom conduct and communication with the professor.
Pilat has been working with Joseph Murphy, the director of the Center for Innovative Pedagogy (CIP), to discuss the addition of a required syllabus section that would communicate each professor’s AI policy for their course. Pilat hopes that the CIP can provide starter statements that give professors a general idea of what a standard AI policy statement may include. However, he explained that it would be at the professors’ discretion to determine what constitutes appropriate AI usage in their classrooms, and what to include in the policy statement on their syllabus. “It’s something that you can theoretically just copy and paste, but my hope is that the faculty will read these and then change it to fit their needs for the class,” Pilat said.
By the end of this semester, Pilat also hopes to have plans for various AI-related programs for the spring, including a faculty panel to discuss AI usage in the classroom and workshops to increase AI literacy.
In addition to clarifying the boundaries of ethical AI use, Pilat would like to weaken the taboo sentiment surrounding the topic. “Considering Kenyon’s current policy, I do not know of any single student who would be willing to share their usage. I think that there’s fear of retribution and there’s fear of increased scrutiny on their assignments,” he said. “We’re avoiding a difficult conversation and treating it as this Pandora’s box that shall never be opened.”
Cara Ferrantelli ’25 agreed. “I think that people are really scared of bringing it up,” she said. “I think you can even see it [in] people not wanting to contribute to this article because no one wants to be associated with it, because it has a bad rap of cheating.”
Despite its lack of initiative addressing AI with the broader Kenyon community, the College has invested heavily in AI research in the past. In 2016, Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities Katherine Elkins was awarded the National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professorship to develop a “human-centered” AI curriculum at Kenyon. The same year, she co-founded the Kenyon Digital Humanities Lab — now the College’s AI Lab — with Visiting Instructor of Humanities Jon Chun. According to Elkins, there have since been over 60,000 downloads of Kenyon students’ AI-focused research from Digital Kenyon, the College’s online collection of research and archives.
Currently, permitted AI use in the classroom varies by course, professor and discipline. For example, AI use is central to several Integrated Program Humane Studies courses, while it is forbidden in most creative writing and computer science courses. In between these extremes falls the disciplines where expectations surrounding AI use are not so clear, even if professors acknowledge that their students are taking advantage of the technology. “One of my philosophy professors just has us fill out a chart after every paper where she asks us to tell her how much we used it,” Owen Walls ’25 said.
Pilat added that first-years and other incoming students have and will have used AI in high school, and that the College may have different expectations than the institutions they are coming from. “We’re going to start having first years who have been allowed to use it in high school, and then if they don’t know what they’re supposed to, or how they’re supposed to respond, I think that causes a lot of confusion,” Pilat said.
Many underclassmen who used AI in high school consider it a valuable resource. “In my experience, many students have used AI in a variety of ways. They used it to generate ideas, creative titles, developing flash cards, and questions to prepare for tests,” Amelia Russell ’28, reflecting on AI usage at her high school, wrote in an email to the Collegian. “Personally, I do think AI can be a positive force in the academic community if it is used properly. As in, preparation for exams, summarizing pages of notes for a quick review of topics or helping to find sources for further test prep.”
Older students use AI for similar tasks. “I don’t know that I have ever outlined my own paper in the last two years,” Walls said. “I use it for significant parts of my writing process, and I use it conversationally to understand the ideas that I’m writing about, but I don’t have it actually put the words together, because that’s a skill that I have.”
He added that consulting AI is also more convenient than going to office hours. “If I have questions that I can get answered instantly and mostly accurately, I don’t know why I’ve wasted professors’ time by having them explain it to me,” he said.
The College is behind many other schools when it comes to addressing AI use on campus, according to Elkins, who is often invited to give keynote lectures at other institutions about how to appropriately implement AI in curricula across various disciplines. “We have not had those conversations about AI yet and what it can do and how students are using it,” Elkins said. As such, she has not yet been involved in any of the conversations Pilat has had with other faculty members regarding changes to syllabi or future AI literacy programs. “I usually come in later in the process, once those conversations have happened and people really want to change their coursework to integrate AI, or at least respond to AI,” she added.
Elkins believes the College should take action to educate faculty about AI. “It would be very helpful for people to have a sense for their own courses, how much of the work can now be done by AI, but also to get a sense of what the use is on campus, because I think it’s probably a lot higher than faculty realize,” she said.