GenAI is a powerful tool that can save time and advance research in many ways. However, for professors, like myself, who are focused on developing critical thinking, reading analysis, effective writing skills, student use of GenAI is primarily an obstacle to achieving these learning objectives. At the same time, it is extremely difficult to stop students from using GenAI. Two possible, effective responses to this dilemma are:

1. “Go analog” and pivot to in-class essay-based exams or private oral examinations and presentations (vivas).  
2. Regular, short in-class reading quizzes that require mention of specific examples from the assigned reading is another such technique. 

Still, many of us find that entirely eliminating out-of-class writing assignments is impossible (and undesirable) and since GenAI is so very easy for students to use on nearly any prompt imaginable, what is to be done?  Use of GenAI detection like GPTZero can be helpful, but it is not entirely reliable. Perhaps more importantly, it is laborious and time-consuming constantly trying to determine if a student’s written work is or is not a product of GenAI.  

With all this in mind, one of the best things we can do is simply appeal to students’ earnestness and remind them of the reason they’re at W&M, the skills they came here to develop (and that employers will be looking for in them) and making clear to students that reliance on GenAI means they are not developing these key skills and are, in fact, putting themselves at a disadvantage in their future careers.  

I recently created a GenAI policy to articulate these ideas to students, and asked them to initial and sign to agree to the policy and acknowledge the consequences of not following it.  Students here are under a lot of pressure and have many competing demands on their time, thus such reminders should probably not be confined to a syllabus policy statement signed at the beginning of the course.  On each written assignment in my courses, I plan to include a brief reminder of the policy and its logic, which must be signed and submitted along with the assignment.