Embracing Generative AI in Computing and Maths Education

As computing, data science and mathematics education continues to evolve, incorporating generative artificial intelligence (AI) into university curricula presents both opportunities and challenges. Our strategy focuses on responsible integration of generative AI use into subjects to balance the benefits of generative AI for learning with maintaining academic integrity, We aim to harness the potential of generative AI to assist with teaching and learning while ensuring it does not compromise student learning outcomes or undermine the value of our university qualifications.

Subject-Specific Approaches

There is no “one size fits all” approach to generative AI use in CDMS subjects. Therefore, subject coordinators are required to be clear about what they expect from students in terms of generative AI use and what identifies as academic misconduct. To maintain the academic integrity of our subjects and degrees, coordinators must also ensure the integrity and accuracy of assessments, to ensure that they are assessing the achievement of learning outcomes for each student.

Artificial Intelligence and Academic Integrity Guidelines

To ensure academic integrity is maintained, we have established the following guidelines:

For Subject Coordinators:

1. Clearly communicate expectations: Inform students at the beginning of each subject about what is allowed and not allowed in terms of generative AI use.
2. Clear instructions: Clearly state on all assessments whether generative AI can be used and how it can be used.
3. Develop case studies: Create scenarios that illustrate the acceptable and unacceptable use of generative AI, serving as examples for students.
4. Monitor student submissions: Regularly review assessments (assignments and exams) for potential misuse of generative AI, without being too intrusive or onerous. If evidence of misconduct is found, make sure to report it to the misconduct team.
5. Use detection tools: Utilise plagiarism detection software specifically designed to identify AI-generated content (e.g., Turnitin’s AI-detection feature).

For Students:

1. Understand the policies: Familiarise yourself with the guidelines on generative AI use and understand the consequences of misuse.
2. Use tools responsibly: If using generative AI, acknowledge its contribution to your work and ensure that your own thought and effort have provided a subtantial contribution.
3. Be aware of the subject and course learning outcomes: students are expected to achieve the subject learning outcomes on completion of subjects and course learning outcomes on completion of a degree. Ensure that generative AI use is not preventing you from achieving these.
4. Develop critical thinking skills: Focus on developing problem-solving strategies, analysing data, and demonstrating understanding, rather than solely relying on generative tools. Being an expert requires deep thinking; reliance on generative AI will lead to shallow thinking and poor decision making.

General Guidelines:

1. Transparency and communication: Be open about our policies regarding generative AI use. Generative AI is integrated into many pieces of popular software and becoming common practice to use, so it is best to be clear about what we expect of its use.
2. Flexibility and adaptability: Stay up-to-date with emerging developments in generative AI and adjust our messages accordingly.
3. Focus on student learning outcomes: Prioritise the development of essential skills, such as problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity, over mere technical proficiency.

These guidelines will create a supportive environment that fosters responsible use of generative AI, promotes academic integrity, and enhances student learning experiences in computing, data science and mathematics education.

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Appendix: Potential Inclusions

Below is a set of examples of instructions to students for specific tasks. They can be used as inspiration for the text that might be provided in an assessment description. Please don't use the text below without adapting it to your subject.

General Statement

Students are required to comply with the university policy on academic integrity found in the Code of Student Conduct found at https://policies.westernsydney.edu.au/document/view.current.php?id=258

All members of the University community, students, faculty and other employees, have the responsibility to report academic misconduct to the appropriate authority.

The School of Computer, Data and Mathematical Science uses software that detects cheating violations for programming projects. Do not use other student’s code, do not share your code, do not copy or use code from someone who took the class X semesters ago, do not use code from online services of generative AI. Start on assessments early so that you do not feel tempted to cheat!

All work that you turn in for grading must be your own! This means that all work must be an independent and individual creation by you or in the case of paired/team assignments; all work must be an independent and individual creation by you and your assigned partner or assigned teammates. Any attempt to gain an unfair advantage in grading, whether for yourself or another, is a violation of academic integrity. You may only work on an assignment with another student(s) in the class if explicitly stated in the assignment description.

Why is Academic Integrity Important?

(Adapted from Matt Stallmann and Mitchell Wand)

Would you want to fly in a plane whose controller software was designed and implemented by a group of people who had never demonstrated the persistence, attention to detail, and ability to deal with negative feedback from compilers, linkers, etc., that it takes to design, implement, and debug a program on their own?

Academic misconduct affects you, your peers, the school, the university, all students who have ever graduated from WSU, and all users of software products to which you contribute. When you receive a degree from WSU:

• The degree represents the university’s certification that you have demonstrated certain skills and knowledge in your degree program.
• Your grade in a subject represents the instructor’s certification that you have demonstrated certain skills and knowledge in the specific subject.
• When an employer sees your degree from WSU, they expect you to be able to demonstrate certain skills and knowledge. If a student graduates with a WSU degree and performs poorly, the value and reputation of a WSU degree is negatively affected.

In industry, intellectual property rights are crucial in software and product development. Rules regarding intellectual property are similar to rules outlining academic integrity. Employees who “cheat” or violate copyrights or other intellectual property rights can cost the employer large sums of money. In addition, even though you will likely work on a team in industry, completion of the CDMS degree includes demonstrating skills to work effectively on teams. For example, students should demonstrate well-developed individual skills, integrity to take responsibility for one’s own work, and the ability to recognize clear boundaries between one’s own contributions and those of others.

Ethics and professionalism are important to the community. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a professional organization for computing professionals, has the ACM Code of Ethics and Professionalism that outlines the ethical principals of the computing community. https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

What happens if misconduct is suspected?

If academic misconduct is suspected, the processes from the Student Misconduct Rule will be followed. https://policies.westernsydney.edu.au/document/view.current.php?id=304

Resources you ARE Allowed to Use

You must cite your use of the approved resources in your assessment submissions. If you do not cite your use of the approved resources, you may be committing plagiarism.

The only people that you MAY receive help from:

• your lecturer
• the tutors and lab demonstrators
• for paired/team assessments, you may receive help from your assigned partner or your assigned teammates, and
• for exercises, you may work with any of your neighbors that are physically present in class.

The only external resources that you MAY also reference:

• your textbook,
• the textbook website,
• the JAVA API HTML pages, and
• other third-party API HTML pages as appropriate for an assessment (for example, you may use the JUnit API HTML pages to help you with writing JUnit tests).

Resources you ARE NOT Allowed to Use

You MAY NOT receive help from anyone or anything else that is not in the list of approved resources (above). If you think a resource should be added to the list of approved resources (above), you must first receive written permission from the instructor so that the instructor can share the resource with all students.

Examples of Academic Misconduct

Note: this list is not exhaustive.

• It is aiding & abetting and cheating to give any student access to any of your work which you have completed for individual class assessment.
• It is cheating and plagiarism to use another person’s work and claim it as your own. You are expected to complete all assessments on your own, unless otherwise specified in the assessment description.
• It is cheating to interfere with another student’s use of computing resources or to circumvent system security.
• It is aiding & abetting and cheating to email, ftp, post on the Internet, bulletin boards, message boards, etc. your work for others to obtain. Do NOT use sites that allow you to “anonymously” post code. Those sites are searchable, and others may find your code (like the teaching staff).
• It is cheating to ask or pay another person or persons to complete an assessment for you.
• It is cheating and plagiarism to decompile any compiled code and use the decompiled source code as your own. You may also break the law by decompiling code.
• It is cheating and plagiarism to use code that you find online, including code behind the Java API webpages.
• It is aiding & abetting and cheating to give another student access to your account (NC State account or others that you use for university work) or to give them your account password.
• It is aiding & abetting and cheating for you and another student to work collaboratively on an assessment, unless otherwise specified by the assessment description.
• It is cheating to circumvent the intention of the assessment and/or the automated grading system (e.g., by hardcoding test case solutions, by copying/pasting code provided in the Java libraries to fulfill an assessment objective, to implement extra lines of code to achieve higher statement coverage, etc.).
• It is aiding & abetting to allow another student to copy from your written or electronic assessment submissions (e.g.,
• it is the student’s responsibility to cover his or her exam answers to help prevent others from copying answers)
• It is cheating and plagiarism to copy from another student’s written assessment (e.g., exams or homework).
• It is cheating to submit identical or similar assessment submissions from an assessment submitted in a previous subject, or a previous attempt of the current subject.
• It is cheating to reuse your code from previous semesters if retaking the subject. Start over to focus your learning this semester.
• It is aiding & abetting to leave your computer unlocked and/or unattended (whether intentional or accidental) such that others could access your assessments.

Examples of NOT Cheating (this list is NOT exhaustive):

• Using the code from the class website (with citations in the comments).
• Using code from other programs YOU wrote in this subject during this semester (with citations in the comments).
• Using code from other programs that YOU and a partner wrote as part of assigned exercises in this subject during this semester (with citations in the comments).
• Help from tutors or lecturers (with citations in the comments).
• Using code from the textbook or textbook website (with citations in the comments).

Example Citations

/* Citing Help from another Person: (In method or class level comments)
   I received help from Dr. Heckman on DATE during her office hours. We discussed X.
*/

/* Citing Help from other Assessments
   The code for this method is based on Exercise Y that I completed with Z on date.
*/

/* Citing Help from the Textbooks
   The code for this method is based on the ArrayList.add() method of the subject 
   textbook "Building Java Programs" by Reges and Step on page 467.
*/

Protecting Yourself

• Do not leave papers lying around your workstation.
• Cover your written exam responses with a cover sheet to prevent others from copying your responses.
• Do not dispose of important papers in the lab recycling bins and trash cans until after the asssessment is graded.
• Do not give out your password.
• Do not leave your workstation unattended or forget to log yourself out.
• Do not leave your laptop unattended.
• Do not give other students access to any of your workspace or email them any code.
• Do not give other students access to your subject materials or your personal computer.
• Do not email, ftp, or post your code on the Internet, message boards, etc.
• Keep all copies of final an intermediate work until after the assessment is graded.
• Keep all graded assessments until after you receive the final semester grade for the subject.
• Do not discuss implementation details of the assessment with your peers.
• Do not discuss the contents of a subject exam with other students, especially those students who have not taken the exam yet.
• Ask the instructor for clarification of any questions or concerns about academic integrity policies before submitting an assessment.

Forum Use

The forum is available to ask questions about assessments (assignments and tests). Do NOT post any code to the forum unless the post is private! The teaching staff reserves the right to edit any student’s forum post for inappropriate content. Additionally, use of the forum is a privilege. Improper use for the forum may result in a ban from posting or reading.

Posting Assessment Artifacts Online

While your deliverable is your work, the assessment artifacts (guided projects, project requirements, project design, provided code, quiz questions, etc.) are the intellectual property of the instructors and the university. You may not post any assessment artifacts (including assignment descriptions) or solutions to a publicly accessible website, public code repository, or assignment repository (e.g., Chegg, etc.) during or after the semester. Teaching staff will request removal of unauthorized materials; failure to remove materials in a timely manner will result in an academic integrity violation.

Some companies like to review student code artifacts as part of a hiring process. You may use class materials for this code portfolio using the following guidelines: 1) the code must be posted in a private repository or online resource and only shared with the hiring manager or reviewer and 2) you must add a README or additional documentation clarifying the parts of the code you implemented and differentiating what was provided for you (GUI, design, tests, etc.). After the review is complete (about 2 weeks), remove permissions from the reviewer.