The Double Standard of genAI use in Higher Education

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I just got an email saying that our writing feedback provider, Studiosity is now using genAI to provide feedback, instead of having human tutors do it – sold through the lens of ‘you get your feedback in minutes, not hours or days!’ After reading this email, I logged into the LMS course I’m taking this semester, I was provided with a big red bubble saying that any use of generative AI, and that ‘Grammarly or similar grammar checker tools are NOT permitted’ (which I’m assuming includes Microsoft Word’s grammar checker).

So educational institutions and their vendors are allowed to use genAI, but students are not? In the name of academic integrity, students are then blamed for cheating (often falsely along equity and diversity lines), whereas educational institutions and edtech companies are praised for being more efficient?

The Double Standard

For full transparency, I’m a student in a university, and I’m a lecturer and researcher in a university.

As an academic, I use genAI tools literally every day – sometimes for supporting research, clarifying factual information (which I check with academic sources) and more frequently, the creation of images through Stable Diffusion and related tools.

To read that I’m not allowed to use genAI as a student negates a massive opportunity for building literacy around a technology that is here to stay, especially when presented with the fact that the university’s chosen vendor for checking my academic writing uses AI. I read this as the university is allowed to use genAI, but I am not. By extension, my student-use of genAI is limited to the technology the university tells me to use, and I am forced to share my personal information with this vendor, whereas tools like chatGPT and Gemini allow for anonymous use.

This sets up inequities in teaching and learning for our students – by dictating what tools they can use to support their creative processes and their study strategies, students are coralled into using tools that they’d never use in the outside world. Everyone I know uses chatGPT, CoPilot, Gemini and other tools, they don’t use Studiosity, so by limiting the technologies students use, and limiting their capacity to learn how to use these tools, the less marketable they’ll be when they graduate.

Policing genAI and genAI literacy

As a lecturer, also allow my students to use genAI wholesale – I allow them to brainstorm, use it to check ideas, create images, and to support their study skills (e.g., creating test questions based on readings, etc.). I believe it’s incredibly problematic to police the usage without an active effort to build literacy around genAI. There are so many opportunities for this technology, in education, industry and society, that to ignore this opportunity is to set our students up for failure when they complete their degree / qualification.

By building in literacy training in generative AI, including what the underlying technologies are, how they work, what they can be leveraged for, as well as the ethical and privacy issues that arise from their use, students can understand more about the opportunities these technologies present, as well as the considerations students need to think about.

Largely, the conversations I’ve had with colleagues and communication around genAI are overwhelmingly about the ‘threat’ of genAI to academic integry, with discussion of genAI literacy being largely non-existent. That’s not to say it’s not there – pockets of staff around my workplace have developed wonderful resources, both for students and for academics, but these are hidden, hard to find, and locked behind passwords and buried in training modules that are linked sporadically and not easily found through online searches.

An integrated approach

What I would love to see at every university is a balanced approach – a reduction of fear-mongering and labelling genAI as a boogeyman, but to understand that with any new technology, there are opportunities and considerations and to have discourse around its use reflect this reality.

We all know that fear of new things often is borne out of ignorance. To address this, building capacity within professional and academic staff around what genAI means for the higher education sector, is the fist step – these are the people who form the backbone of any institution. Following this, building student literacy around the use of genAI for reflection, assessment, study, creativity and other areas should be a priority.

Without these two sides of the same coin, the reality of a world with genAI is simply being hidden from students. They are blindfolded due to the lack of planning, lack of literacy and lack of leadership from their institutions.