Tag: statements

  • The Case Against AI Disclosure Statements (opinion)

    The Case Against AI Disclosure Statements (opinion)

    I used to require my students submit AI disclosure statements any time they used generative AI on an assignment. I won’t be doing that anymore.

    From the beginning of our current AI-saturated moment, I leaned into ChatGPT, not away, and was an early adopter of AI in my college composition classes. My early adoption of AI hinged on the need for transparency and openness. Students had to disclose to me when and how they were using AI. I still fervently believe in those values, but I no longer believe that required disclosure statements help us achieve them.

    Look. I get it. Moving away from AI disclosure statements is antithetical to many of higher ed’s current best practices for responsible AI usage. But I started questioning the wisdom of the disclosure statement in spring 2024, when I noticed a problem. Students in my composition courses were turning in work that was obviously created with the assistance of AI, but they failed to proffer the required disclosure statements. I was puzzled and frustrated. I thought to myself, “I allow them to use AI; I encourage them to experiment with it; all I ask is that they tell me they’re using AI. So, why the silence?” Chatting with colleagues in my department who have similar AI-permissive attitudes and disclosure requirements, I found they were experiencing similar problems. Even when we were telling our students that AI usage was OK, students still didn’t want to fess up.

    Fess up. Confess. That’s the problem.

    Mandatory disclosure statements feel an awful lot like a confession or admission of guilt right now. And given the culture of suspicion and shame that dominates so much of the AI discourse in higher ed at the moment, I can’t blame students for being reluctant to disclose their usage. Even in a class with a professor who allows and encourages AI use, students can’t escape the broader messaging that AI use should be illicit and clandestine.

    AI disclosure statements have become a weird kind of performative confession: an apology performed for the professor, marking the honest students with a “scarlet AI,” while the less scrupulous students escape undetected (or maybe suspected, but not found guilty).

    As well intentioned as mandatory AI disclosure statements are, they have backfired on us. Instead of promoting transparency and honesty, they further stigmatize the exploration of ethical, responsible and creative AI usage and shift our pedagogy toward more surveillance and suspicion. I suggest that it is more productive to assume some level of AI usage as a matter of course, and, in response, adjust our methods of assessment and evaluation while simultaneously working toward normalizing the usage of AI tools in our own work.

    Studies show that AI disclosure carries risks both in and out of the classroom. One study published in May reports that any kind of disclosure (both voluntary and mandatory) in a wide variety of contexts resulted in decreased trust in the person using AI (this remained true even when study participants had prior knowledge of an individual’s AI usage, meaning, the authors write, “The observed effect can be attributed primarily to the act of disclosure rather than to the mere fact of AI usage.”)

    Another recent article points to the gap present between the values of honesty and equity when it comes to mandatory AI disclosure: People won’t feel safe to disclose AI usage if there’s an underlying or perceived lack of trust and respect.

    Some who hold unfavorable attitudes toward AI will point to these findings as proof that students should just avoid AI usage altogether. But that doesn’t strike me as realistic. Anti-AI bias will only drive student AI usage further underground and lead to fewer opportunities for honest dialogue. It also discourages the kind of AI literacy employers are starting to expect and require.

    Mandatory AI disclosure for students isn’t conducive to authentic reflection but is instead a kind of virtue signaling that chills the honest conversation we should want to have with our students. Coercion only breeds silence and secrecy.

    Mandatory AI disclosure also does nothing to curb or reduce the worst features of badly written AI papers, including the vague, robotic tone; the excess of filler language; and, their most egregious hallmark, the fabricated sources and quotes.

    Rather than demanding students confess their AI crimes to us through mandatory disclosure statements, I advocate both a shift in perspective and a shift of assignments. We need to move from viewing students’ AI assistance as a special exception warranting reactionary surveillance to accepting and normalizing AI usage as a now commonplace feature of our students’ education.

    That shift does not mean we should allow and accept any and all student AI usage. We shouldn’t resign ourselves to reading AI slop that a student generates in an attempt to avoid learning. When confronted with a badly written AI paper that sounds nothing like the student who submitted it, the focus shouldn’t be on whether the student used AI but on why it’s not good writing and why it fails to satisfy the assignment requirements. It should also go without saying that fake sources and quotes, regardless of whether they are of human or AI origin, should be called out as fabrications that won’t be tolerated.

    We have to build assignments and evaluation criteria that disincentivize the kinds of unskilled AI usage that circumvent learning. We have to teach students basic AI literacy and ethics. We have to build and foster learning environments that value transparency and honesty. But real transparency and honesty require safety and trust before they can flourish.

    We can start to build such a learning environment by working to normalize AI usage with our students. Some ideas that spring to mind include:

    • Telling students when and how you use AI in your own work, including both successes and failures in AI usage.
    • Offering clear explanations to students about how they could use AI productively at different points in your class and why they might not want to use AI at other points. (Danny Liu’s Menus model is an excellent example of this strategy.)
    • Adding an assignment such as an AI usage and reflection journal, which offers students a low-stakes opportunity to experiment with AI and reflect upon the experience.
    • Adding an opportunity for students to present to the class on at least one cool, weird or useful thing that they did with AI (maybe even encouraging them to share their AI failures, as well).

    The point with these examples is that we are inviting students into the messy, exciting and scary moment we all find ourselves in. They shift the focus away from coerced confessions to a welcoming invitation to join in and share their own wisdom, experience and expertise that they accumulate as we all adjust to the age of AI.

    Julie McCown is an associate professor of English at Southern Utah University. She is working on a book about how embracing AI disruption leads to more engaging and meaningful learning for students and faculty.

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  • How To Teach With AI Transparency Statements – Faculty Focus

    How To Teach With AI Transparency Statements – Faculty Focus

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  • Judge strikes down Minnesota dual enrollment program’s ban on faith statements

    Judge strikes down Minnesota dual enrollment program’s ban on faith statements

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     Dive Brief:

    • A federal judge on Friday struck down a Minnesota law prohibiting colleges that require high school students to sign statements of faith from participating in a state dual enrollment program.
    • The University of Northwestern and Crown College, two conservative Christian institutions in Minnesota, sued the state in 2023 over the law which rendered them ineligible to participate in the Postsecondary Enrollment Options program. Both colleges require on-campus students to sign religious conduct agreements.
    • Siding with the colleges, U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel ruled that Minnesota’s law infringed on their constitutional rights by making them choose between participating in the PSEO program and practicing their religion.

    Dive Insight:

    Since 1985, Minnesota’s PSEO program has allowed local high school students to earn college credit for nonsectarian coursework at participating colleges. The program is free for eligible students and reimburses colleges with fixed payments per credit hour.

    But a 2023 law, passed by the state’s Democrat-controlled Legislature, prohibited colleges from participating in the program if they require faith statements or make admission decisions based on “race, creed, ethnicity, disability, gender, or sexual orientation or religious beliefs or affiliations.”

    The University of Northwestern requires students and employees to sign a pledge to abstain from “same sex romantic intimacy.” And Crown’s student conduct policy does not allow involvement or promotion of “any sexual behavior outside the marriage of one man and one woman.”

    Both institutions, joined by three parents of high school students, sued the state the same day Democratic Gov. Tim Walz signed the legislation into law.

    The Minnesota Department of Education filed counterclaims, arguing that Crown and the University of Northwestern’s admissions policies for the PSEO program are unconstitutional.

    Early on in the case, Brasel blocked the state from enforcing the new law, allowing the colleges to continue enrolling PSEO students and earning state funds from the program while the case proceeded. Between the 2017-18 and 2022-23 academic year, the University of Northwestern received over $33.2 million from the program, and Crown received roughly $5.8 million.

    In her Friday ruling, Brasel sided with the colleges.

    “If the Schools’ eligibility to participate in PSEO is conditioned on not using faith statements as an admissions requirement, their free exercise in maintaining a campus community of like‐minded believers is burdened,” said Brasel, a Trump appointee. Families also lose their right to free exercise of religion if they can’t use the public benefit at “a school of their choice of like‐minded believers,” she said.

    The judge further wrote that if the state elects to fund private education, officials cannot disqualify private schools solely because they’re religious.

    Brasel also dismissed the state’s counterclaims Friday.

    The Minnesota Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.

    The leaders of Crown and the University of Northwestern — Andrew Denton and Corbin Hoornbeek, respectively — celebrated the verdict Saturday.

    “This legislation has given us yet another opportunity to affirm our mission; we remain committed to equipping our students to grow intellectually and spiritually to serve effectively in their professions and give God-honoring leadership in the home, church, community, and world,” Hoornbeek said in a statement.

    The same day, Denton thanked the legislators who originally opposed the ban and said Crown was grateful for the law’s reversal.

    “The court made clear that Minnesota cannot single out high school students who want to attend a faith-centered institution,” he said. 

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  • The secret lives of Subject Benchmark Statements

    The secret lives of Subject Benchmark Statements

    Higher education providers are currently experiencing unprecedented degrees of pressure, not only in terms of the constraints imposed by the current financial climate but in the increased expectations placed upon them by students, policymakers and the public. At the same time, they’re having to address the challenges posed by new technologies and workplace practices, environmental concerns and economic conditions, as well as by a growing focus on fair access to higher education.

    Such issues are at the fore of the sector’s own debates. Recent HEPI blogs have, for example, focused on the importance of reasonable adjustments, the value of widening participation, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and institutional AI initiatives. Colleagues from GuildHE have written here and elsewhere about how specialist providers are essential to the delivery of the government’s industrial strategy – just as Universities UK has argued that graduates will play a vital role in that strategy, presenting an analysis which demonstrates that ‘growth sectors identified by the government in its industrial strategy require high levels of graduate skills across all regions and nations of the UK’.

    These priorities reflect those of the UK government. When the Education Secretary for England wrote to providers in November, she said she expected them to ‘play a stronger role in expanding access and improving outcomes for disadvantaged students’, ‘make a stronger contribution to economic growth’, ‘play a greater civic role in their communities’ and ‘raise the bar further on teaching standards’.

    Sector bodies and think tanks have produced valuable reports on these issues. But one lower-profile resource used by educators to anchor provision to such commitments is the Subject Benchmark Statement. This instrument plays a key role in demonstrating and underpinning how HEIs deliver the industry-aligned graduate skills essential for economic growth – those skills highlighted by GuildHE and Universities UK, and required by government strategies.

    Subject Benchmark Statements are curated by QAA as the sector-led descriptors of taught disciplines. They describe the nature of study and the academic standards expected of graduates in specific subject areas – showing what graduates should know and be able to do at the end of their studies. Academic staff use them to inform the design, delivery and enhancement of programmes. They are included as key reference points in guidance on cyclical review in Scotland and Wales, and in institutions’ validation and assurance of provision across the UK.

    They are created by panels of academic experts and representatives of employers and Professional, Statutory and Regulatory Bodies. At a time when providers are expected to demonstrate their contribution to the UK’s industrial strategy, they use industry expertise to determine the skillsets needed for professional success and economic growth. They inform prospective students of the career paths advanced by their subjects, tell prospective employers what they can expect from a graduate of those subjects and assure policymakers of the value of those subjects.

    Today, we are publishing this year’s set of Subject Benchmark Statements: revised editions of the Statements for, Accounting, Education Studies, Finance, Music, and Philosophy, as well as for Librarianship, Information, Knowledge, Records & Archives Management, and Physics, Astronomy & Astrophysics; and a new Statement for Public Policy & Public Administration.

    Key to the formulation of these Statements has been the development, through consultation with sector and industry stakeholders, of a set of themes which underpin their focus. These themes align with concerns shared by policymakers across the political spectrum. They include sustainability, access and success in higher education, graduate employability and artificial intelligence.

    These emphases reflect not only the key expectations set by the Education Secretary last autumn, but also government priorities in such areas as green prosperity and AI. Subject Benchmark Statements also chart strategies for the enhancement of educational quality the Secretary of State has called for. They function alongside other key sector reference points – such as the Qualifications Frameworks and the Quality Code – to underpin the standards and enhance the quality of higher education. They are a mechanism by which programmes assure and articulate their educational, economic and social value and demonstrate the continuing relevance of their subjects to governments and the public.

    To see how this works, it’s worth taking a moment to look at an example from our new set of Statements. This is the first time that there’s been a separate Subject Benchmark Statement dedicated to Public Policy & Public Administration (a subject well suited to this forum), so let’s take a look at that.

    Its subject panel included three representatives of the Local Government Association, alongside practitioners and educators from 13 universities. An emphasis on industry impact shines through its 25 pages. It includes articulations of core skills at varying levels of study and attainment, and explains the purposes of a degree in its discipline, as well as strategies to promote accessibility and sustainable development. It also details the approaches to be taken by the discipline in relation to professional employability, both in terms of broad expectations and in relation to its specific engagement with artificial intelligence.

    In this context, it expects that ‘while degrees will have the capacity to develop career-ready students, they must also equip sector-experienced students with the knowledge, behaviours and skills that will enable them to develop and progress within the workplace’ and that ‘courses may provide and/or require opportunities for students to work individually or collaboratively with employers and/or relevant public sector stakeholders’.

    It adds that its degrees should ‘promote employability in a labour market that is becoming increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence’ and ‘prepare and equip students for work environments that require professionals to work alongside smart machines’ – and that therefore ‘to ensure students can complete their studies responsibly and with integrity, and be equipped to enter a world increasingly impacted by generative AI, Public Policy and/or Public Administration degrees must recognise and respond to employer and workplace needs’.

    Each Subject Benchmark Statement underpins the continuing relevance and value of its discipline to industry and students alike. As the University of Birmingham’s Dr Karin Bottom (who chaired the Public Policy & Public Administration panel) has emphasized, one of the key impacts of a Subject Benchmark Statement is that it ‘gives programmes credibility with organisations that may fund people who take these degrees and that may employ people who’ve taken these degrees’ – and ‘gives employers and practitioner groups a reference point as to what practitioners need to know’.

    At a time when many academic subject areas have come under increasing pressure (whether in terms of their commercial viability, their contribution to economic growth, or the careers they support), it remains crucial for the sector, students, taxpayers and policymakers to ensure that their value is not only expressed but also underpinned by benchmarking at the level of specific disciplines.

    And, as policymakers have recently stressed the need to prevent the emergence of regional ‘cold spots’ in specific subject areas, these sector-led, industry-informed, expert-written documents can also help, in the formulation of such policies, to hone a closer understanding of the impacts and contributions of their disciplines.

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  • DEI statements could function as ideological firewalls, new study finds

    DEI statements could function as ideological firewalls, new study finds

    Findings from my study — released as an issue brief by Manhattan Institute — provide the first available empirical evidence that DEI statements in faculty hiring and promotion could be used as political firewalls to enforce ideological conformity and screen out candidates who hold dissenting views.

    In the study, applicants who discussed having engaged in specific DEI-related efforts — such as building outreach programs targeting students and faculty of color or chairing a committee on race relations — received higher scores from faculty evaluators.

    All told, data from seven experimental studies involving 4,953 tenured/tenure-track university faculty together show that faculty exhibit a clear preference for DEI statements that discuss race/ethnicity and gender, while down-rating those that do not.

    Even if applicants began their statements by explicitly saying, “I have long been committed to equity, diversity, and inclusion,” and then detailed work on mentoring and outreach to students in rural communities — but not race-based or feminist efforts — they were far less likely to be recommended for further review.

    In fact, one of the studies found that only 45% of faculty who evaluated a viewpoint diversity DEI statement recommended advancing the candidate for further review, compared to 88% of faculty who recommended advancing the candidate who discussed race or gender-based efforts.

    FIRE has long argued that requiring DEI statements can too easily function as a political litmus test in hiring and promotion, forcing faculty to express prevailing ideological positions on DEI — or face the consequences. 

    Moreover, even among college and university faculty, opinions on DEI statements are mixed. In two different large national surveys, FIRE found that faculty were split on whether colleges should require DEI statements in job applications. 

    There are still many unexplored questions about DEI statements, and their future remains uncertain. That said, it remains to be seen whether DEI statements are being eliminated entirely by some institutions, or whether they are simply being rebranded. 

    But insofar as DEI statements function as a form of viewpoint discrimination disguised as an anti-discrimination initiative, colleges and universities should reconsider their continued use.

    FIRE has model legislation to prohibit the use of political litmus tests in faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure awards, and in student admissions at public institutions of higher education. 

    For more information about this work, please see the now available issue brief or the underlying academic pre-print.

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  • Heterodox Academy report finds spike in neutrality statements

    Heterodox Academy report finds spike in neutrality statements

    Since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, triggering a brutal retaliatory war in Gaza, at least 140 colleges and universities have adopted statements of institutional neutrality—up from just eight prior to the attacks, according to a new report from Heterodox Academy, a nonprofit advocacy group seeking to promote viewpoint diversity on college campuses.

    The vast majority of institutions—97 percent—cited the values of “community and inclusion” to justify their embrace of statement neutrality. “Free speech and academic freedom” and “public trust” were each referenced as a rationale by 88 percent of institutions; 64 percent attributed the move to “balancing rights and responsibilities.”

    Of the institutions that have adopted neutrality statements since 2023, 78 percent are public and 22 percent private. Governing boards drove the change at 68 percent of the public institutions; at more than a quarter of those—including in Indiana, Utah and North Carolina—state legislatures mandated the shift. At private institutions, presidents and faculty were much more likely than governing boards to instigate the push for institutional neutrality.

    “The rapid adoption of institutional statement neutrality policies marks a major shift in how colleges and universities engage with broader societal debates,” the Heterodox report reads. “Statement neutrality not only empowers students, faculty, and staff to engage in robust debate, it also reinforces the critical values of seeking truth and generating knowledge rather than advocating for partisan political positions. In an era of declining public confidence in higher education, these policies represent a critical step toward restoring universities as trusted spaces for free inquiry and intellectual growth.”

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