15 Guidance for Talking to Students about AI Use in Your Class

By Siddharth Bhogra, 2024-25 PWR Assistant Director

Despite all of your efforts to discuss and engage your students around ethical use of genAI or not using genAI, it’s happened: you’ve encountered a piece of student writing that includes citations that don’t exist, or appears to be extremely polished on first read but perhaps falls apart on closer interrogation, or that sounds suspiciously like middle management, and you now feel like you need to have a difficult conversation with your student about genAI and writing. Indeed, given the increasing ubiquity of generative AI and related tools, such conversations are perhaps inevitable. In this chapter we share some suggestions for how you might approach these conversations.

First, ask the student to meet with you to talk about their writing. We suggest you do this in office hours, or after class, and that you ensure you have a space in which you can talk to them comfortably, seriously, and perhaps not publicly. We suggest that you not frame the conversation around suspected AI use – not because you want to catch them out, but simply because, to be totally honest, there’s no way to know for sure if they’ve actually used AI. Even if you feel like you are 99% sure, it’s important for you to create a genuine space for conversation and to give your student the benefit of the doubt. You also want to keep your course learning goals in mind: You’re not a hard-boiled detective going after a good-for-nothing crook, but a pedagogue hoping their student learns something meaningful about composition in your class.

Our experience is that students are generally responsive to these requests for a meeting or conversation. In the rare, rare instance that  a student does not respond to your email / might not, for whatever reason, realize that it is actually important for them to come speak with you, you may consider letting them know that you will not be able to give them feedback or credit for this particular assignment until you both can get together and talk through their submission.

Second, highlight or make note of instances in their writing that you would like to talk about at the meeting. These may be strange references, moments with made-up details, or  other markers of AI writing that you might be familiar with / recognize. It’s important too, keeping in mind your course goals and outcomes, that you also highlight instances in the writing that you might consider to be areas for improvement, simply as a piece of writing, regardless of how it might have been composed. These might relate to the prompt, the course outcomes, and your general expectations – in this assignment, and the course, more broadly – as the instructor on record.

Third, during your meeting with your student, consider opening by asking them to talk you through their composing process and how they made choices as they responded to the prompt. Be open to what you might learn from them about their work. We suggest that you keep this conversation focused on the writing itself, and not about AI. For instance, you might ask them to talk more about the references they made (that the AI might have made up). You could ask about what they think X particular quote means, or ask about the context of the reading from which they pulled the quote. You might ask how they are understanding certain concepts they cite, or complicated terms they use, or arguments they make. Another route could be to ask them why they are making X particular argument, or Y particular point. In other words: ask them questions about the writing and their writing process with the goal of building your understanding and learning from them.

In navigating these moves, you should be building a better understanding of the student’s work on the assignment and connected meaningfully with the student around their composing process and their engagement with course texts, prompts, and materials. It’s at this point that you can raise your questions about the use of AI in their writing. The idea here is that you want to defer focusing on AI for as long as you can, while keeping your focus, and your student’s attention, on the writing itself. You are teaching a composition course, after all! But ultimately, you also can’t avoid talking about AI entirely. You still need to look directly at this horrible, gnarled creature. Thankfully, despite how much it might feel like AI is a cursed mythical figure, it is not Medusa, and you will not turn into stone.

Depending on how the conversation has gone, you will have built an understanding of how well the student actually knows or doesn’t know their own writing, the goals they have for it, and how they’ve tried to navigate the assignment prompt. It’s important to keep in mind that there’s a wide range of possibilities around students’ use of AI in their composing process. Sometimes students have used AI but actually know, quite well, what they’re trying to do in an assignment. (This could be because they used AI for translation, having written the essay in their native language, or used a tool like Grammarly to polish their writing). Other times, they may have used AI in ways that undercut or circumvent your course learning goals.

Below we outline a couple of scenarios that illustrate some ways this conversation might go:

• Scenario #1: If, when you bring up your suspicions about AI use, they agree that yes, they did indeed use AI, ask them about how they used it; for what; and why. You may come up with a plan for them to revise a particular assignment, or complete an extra component (for instance, in the case of a student using translation software, you might consider asking them to write a metacognitive reflection for each assignment, reflecting on what translation is doing / has done to their writing) – to be clear, you don’t need to do any of this, this is entirely up to your bandwidth, as an instructor, and the amount of time you have to put into your course (you do have a workload agreement in your contract, after all, so keep that in mind and make a judgement call).
• Scenario #2: If they deny using AI, that is a harder problem. You may gently but firmly push back if you like, just once, citing evidence from the conversation so far, but if a student still denies it, there’s nothing much you can do. It’s ok, at this point, to drop it and walk away from the conversation.

Regardless of either scenario, you’re having this conversation with your student because you’ve identified aspects of the writing that you think could do with improvement, and because you want to support your student’s learning. End the conversation by talking about those areas of improvement. Help your student understand where and how they might improve this piece of writing, regardless of how it was produced. Lean back into your  experience – and expertise – as a composition instructor and help your student understand how they can further develop, as writer, composer, thinker.

TL;DR: Ask questions. A lot of questions. Keep the conversation centered on composition, not AI. Defer talking about AI as much as possible; but also, you can’t totally avoid talking about it either. Help your student understand how they might improve their writing, regardless of how it was written.