The short version. You may use generative AI to help you understand things. You may not use it to produce the work I am assessing. Whenever you use it for anything that touches an assignment, say so. If you are unsure whether a use is allowed, ask me before you do it — that question has never once gotten a student in trouble.
Why I have this policy at all
The point of an assignment is not the document you hand in. The point is the thinking you do to produce it. When you outsource that thinking, you get a document and no thinking, which is the worst possible trade: you have spent the tuition and the semester and acquired nothing that will still be with you in five years.
This is not a technophobic position. I use these tools myself, I have taught with them, and I think the ability to work well with them is becoming part of professional competence in research and policy work. But "working well with them" presupposes that you can already do the underlying task — that you can tell when a summary has flattened an argument, when a citation is fabricated, when a paragraph is fluent and empty. You build that judgment by doing the work without the tool first. That is what my courses are for.
What is permitted, what requires disclosure, and what is prohibited
Unless your course outline says otherwise, this is the default in all of my courses.
Permitted, no disclosure needed
- Asking an AI tool to explain a concept, a theory, or a statistical method you did not understand in class or in the reading.
- Asking it to quiz you, generate practice questions, or check your understanding before an exam.
- Using spelling and grammar checkers, including the ones built into your word processor, and translation tools to understand a source in another language.
- Using AI to help debug code you wrote yourself in R, Python, or SPSS, in courses where coding is part of the work.
- Asking it to explain feedback you received, or what a marking criterion means.
- Checking that your citations are correctly formatted — that a reference is properly constructed in APA or Chicago, that your in-text citations match your reference list, that you have not mixed the two styles. See the note below for the one assignment where this does not apply.
On that last one: you are already permitted to use Zotero, which formats references automatically and does a better job than any chatbot will. Using an AI tool to check punctuation in a reference list is the same kind of act. The skill being assessed in a research paper is finding, reading, and using sources — not remembering whether Chicago puts a comma between the author and the year. Two cautions, though. These tools get citation formats wrong with some regularity, particularly for government documents and reports, so verify against the citation guide rather than trusting the output. And a formatting check is not a substitute for having the source: asking a tool to produce a reference for something you have not read is fabrication, and falls squarely under the prohibited list below.
Permitted, but you must disclose it
- Brainstorming topics, angles, or counterarguments at the start of a project.
- Asking for feedback on a draft you wrote — "is my thesis clear," "does this paragraph support my argument," "where is my reasoning weak."
- Using it to reorganise or tighten prose you wrote yourself, provided the ideas, structure, and evidence remain yours.
- Using it as a starting point for finding literature, provided you locate, read, and verify every source yourself.
Prohibited
- Generating any text, in whole or in part, that you submit as your own writing. This includes generating a draft and then rewriting it.
- Generating an outline or argumentative structure that you then fill in.
- Using AI to summarise a reading in place of reading it, and then writing about that reading as though you had read it.
- Any use at all during in-class assessments, tests, and exams, unless I have said otherwise in writing.
- Submitting AI-generated citations, quotations, data, or statistics. These tools fabricate sources that look entirely plausible, and a fabricated citation is treated as academic dishonesty whether or not you knew it was fabricated. If you cite it, you are vouching for it.
- Using AI to translate an entire text you wrote in another language and submitting the output as your own English prose, in courses where writing in English is part of what is being assessed.
The exception: annotated bibliographies
No AI use of any kind is permitted on annotated bibliography assignments — including the citation formatting check that is otherwise allowed above.
The reason is that an annotated bibliography is not a paper with a bibliography attached. It is the bibliography, and every component of it is what I am assessing: whether you can locate the right sources, construct a reference correctly, read each source closely enough to state its argument and method in a few sentences, and judge how it bears on your question. Strip out the parts a tool could do and there is no assignment left. This is precisely the assignment where doing the work yourself has the highest payoff, because it builds the habits — careful reading, accurate summary, correct referencing — that every later paper depends on.
So on these assignments: format the citations yourself, using the citation guide or Zotero, and write the annotations from your own reading. You may still use spelling and grammar checkers. If you are not certain whether an assignment counts as an annotated bibliography, ask me — the answer is usually obvious from the assignment sheet, and where it is not, I will tell you.
How to disclose
Disclosure is a short statement at the end of the assignment, after your reference list. It does not count toward your word limit, and it does not cost you marks. Name the tool, say what you used it for, and say what you did with the output.
Example disclosure statement
AI use statement: I used Claude to generate a list of possible counterarguments to my thesis after I had written my first draft. Two of those counterarguments prompted me to add the paragraph on page 6; the wording of that paragraph is my own. I also used ChatGPT to explain the difference between fixed and random effects models while I was reading Huber (2019). No AI-generated text appears in this paper.
If you did not use AI at all, you can write "AI use statement: none," or leave it out entirely. A missing statement is read as "I did not use it."
Two things worth knowing about disclosure. First, disclosing a prohibited use does not make it permitted — it just means you were honest about it, which I will take into account, but the work still cannot be assessed as your own. Second, over-disclosing costs you nothing. Students sometimes worry that admitting to using a grammar checker will look bad. It will not.
Citing AI when it is part of your evidence
Occasionally an AI tool's output is itself the thing you are writing about — for instance, if you are analysing how a chatbot describes a political conflict. In that case the output is data, and you cite it as such: name the model and version, the date, the exact prompt, and include the full exchange in an appendix. See the citation guide for the format. Because these outputs are not reproducible or retrievable by your reader, an appendix is not optional.
Group work
In group assignments the disclosure statement covers the whole group, and every member is responsible for what is submitted. "My teammate generated that section and I did not know" is not a defence that has ever gone well for anyone. Agree on how your group will handle AI at your first meeting, before anyone starts writing.
When I think the policy has been broken
I do not use AI detectors as evidence. They are unreliable, they produce false positives at rates that would be unacceptable in any other assessment context, and they are biased against students writing in a second language — which describes a great many of my students. No student in my courses will be accused on the basis of a detector score.
What I do instead is look at the work itself: citations that do not exist or do not say what they are claimed to say; claims about readings that were not in the readings; a sudden discontinuity in voice or ability; specificity that vanishes exactly where specificity would require having done the research. When something does not add up, my first step is a conversation, not an accusation. I will ask you about your paper — your sources, your choices, why you structured the argument the way you did. Students who did the work find that conversation easy.
If, after that, I conclude that work was submitted that is not yours, I am required to report it. At Champlain, the Institutional Policy on the Evaluation of Student Learning defines plagiarism to include the unauthorised use of AI, requires a grade of zero on the affected work, and requires that the incident be reported; repeated infractions escalate. At Concordia, unauthorised AI use falls under the Academic Code of Conduct, and cases go to the Faculty for handling — see Academic Integrity for what that process involves. These are institutional obligations, not discretionary choices on my part.
A few questions I get every semester
"Is Grammarly allowed?" Basic spelling and grammar correction, yes. Grammarly's generative features that rewrite sentences or produce text for you fall under the disclosure tier, and full-paragraph generation is prohibited. The line is whether the tool is fixing your prose or writing prose for you.
"What if English is not my first language?" You may use translation tools to understand sources, and grammar tools to correct your own writing. What you may not do is write in another language and have a tool produce the English. If writing in English is a real obstacle for you, come talk to me early in the term — there are supports available, and I would much rather help you find them in September than have a conversation about a paper in December.
"Everyone else is using it." Some are. The ones who are using it to avoid the work are, in my experience, visibly worse at the things this course was supposed to teach them by the end of the term, and they are also the ones who struggle in the exam. I am not asking you to be naive about what your classmates do. I am telling you what the trade actually costs.
"Can I use it for my research methods project?" The same tiers apply, with one addition: in methods courses, you must be able to explain and defend every line of code and every analytic choice in your project. If you cannot walk me through why you specified a model a particular way, it does not matter where the code came from — you have not demonstrated the skill the assignment was assessing.
"What if the syllabus says something different?" Follow the syllabus. Individual assignments sometimes need a stricter or a more permissive rule than this default, and when they do, I will say so in writing.
Still unsure about a specific use? Ask me. I would far rather answer a question in advance than adjudicate one afterwards.