ACADEMIC INTEGRITY: GUIDANCE ON THE USE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS FROM IB

Opportunities created by AI tools reinforce that academic integrity is an ethical choice that students must make. Students cannot learn about acting with integrity by being given a list of rules for the examination room or learning a particular format for referencing. They learn by talking about what it means to act with academic integrity and seeing it role-modelled around them.

To initiate a conversation about this topic, teachers could consider the links between:

• • • TOK ways of knowing and acting with academic integrity
    • arts, legitimately emulating a particular person’s style and acting with academic integrity
    • the scientific principle of testing another’s hypothesis and acting with academic integrity.

The key message is that students need to be taught about academic integrity, and discussions about the ethical use of AI are a great classroom exercise.

• The teacher has seen the student develop the work over a period of time—IB coursework is not designed to be completed in a single evening.

This is the best approach to ensuring that the work belongs to the student, and it also encourages best practices in writing coursework.

• The student can explain their work sufficiently—to give confidence that it has been created by them.
• The student is clear when they are quoting other people’s ideas and when they are claiming an idea or conclusion as their own work—this is the expected way of referencing.
• The teacher confirms the quality of the final piece of work is in line with what they would expect the student to be able to produce.

Teachers are the best placed to know what a student is capable of and when a piece of work appears not to have been written by that student. If teachers are not convinced that the work is the student’s own, it must not be submitted to the IB. If it has been written for them by their parents/guardians, sibling, tutor or obtained from an essay mill, the IB is less likely than the teacher to be able to identify this. The IB is very effective in spotting similar work used by students in different schools—for example, two students buying the same essay off the internet. While tools are being developed to detect essays written by AI tools, it is likely to be a while before they are reliable enough to be the sole evidence of academic misconduct that leads to a student losing their grade for the subject concerned.

It is a school’s decision on how to deal with a student who submits work that is not their own, as per the school’s academic integrity policy. For example, are students allowed to submit entirely new work, to rewrite it under supervision, or do they lose the opportunity to submit anything?

The IB’s only requirement is that work that is not the student's own cannot be submitted for assessment; it does not accept a marking penalty for such work. Teachers must keep in mind that if a student does not submit coursework, then the IB will not award a grade in that subject.

The IB will not ban the use of AI software. The simplest reason is that it is the wrong way  to deal with innovation. Over the next few years, the use of this kind of software will become as routine as calculators and translation programs. It is more sensible to adapt and teach students how to use these new tools ethically.

AI tools do not threaten the underlying principles of what the IB values. Students are expected to research a topic, and with today’s technology, that likely means starting with an internet search. In assessment, the IB does not (generally) award marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar. Where communication is assessed, we will need to think carefully what this means, but it is more than just having a well-written paragraph and requires considering the key messages for the audience. AI may provide a starting text, but the student will need to understand how and why to refine the text to improve its impact.

AI tools do not represent a crisis in education or assessment. However, in a world where everyone can use software to write newspaper articles, business reports and/or emails to friends, it is a game changer in terms of the skills students need. Instead of being able to produce complete essays, reports, and so on, students need to know how to get the best out of AI tools. For example, to edit text to personalize it, and most importantly, to recognize the inherent bias in what is produced because of the bias in the programming and the material that the AI tool has been trained on from its creators.

Students should be informed of the following rules.

• If they use the text (or any other product) produced by an AI tool—be that by copying or paraphrasing that text or modifying an image—they must clearly reference the AI tool in the body of their work and add it to the bibliography.
• The in-text citation should contain quotation marks using the referencing style already in use by the school and the citation should also contain the prompt given to the AI tool and the date the AI generated the text.

The same applies to any other material that the student has obtained from other categories of AI tools—for example, images.