MARCH 7, 2024 VOLUME 117 ISSUE 9
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BEHIND THE SCREENS: What 650 syllabi show about Western’s ChatGPT response
ARISIA QARRI GAZETTE
SONIA PERSAUD FEATURES EDITOR
W
hen Western University president Alan Shepard was a 20-something undergraduate student at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., he wrote every one of his essay paragraphs on a typewriter. Then, he’d often scratch them out and start again — over and over. As Shepard observes today’s students — who have upgraded from typewriters to laptops and touchscreen tablets — he sees a new tool in their arsenal: generative artificial intelligence. Just over a year ago, ChatGPT was released. Students at Western and across the world have been enthralled by the large language model-based chatbot and its more recent competitors including Google’s Gemini.
Last September, Western appointed computer science professor Mark Daley as its chief AI officer — a first-of-its-kind role at a Canadian university — to support the community in understanding AI and its applications. AI can write intelligible essays. It can write functional computer code. It can even write rhyming poetry. While Shepard is worried that this will hinder student learning, the university does not currently have a policy governing the use of AI — and Shepard is not pushing for one. “I’m OK with not having some big formal policy at this stage,” says Shepard. “Policy sometimes seems to me to get in the way of really clear think-
ing and innovation. So, we don’t want it to be used, for sure, and we don’t want to do anything to diminish the quality of a Western University degree.” Daley tells the Gazette the lack of an official policy is because Western is empowering individual instructors to make the best decisions for their students, given the university’s broad range of disciplines and course types. “A core value and principle of our institution is academic freedom, so we trust that instructors are best placed to teach,” says Daley. Shepard agrees. The Gazette analyzed over 650 course syllabi for undergraduate courses beginning in fall 2023 to see how faculties, departments and individual course instructors are responding to generative AI like ChatGPT in their classrooms.
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The results show that 34 per cent of the 657 syllabi analyzed by the Gazette included guidelines on how students were to use generative AI in their coursework. Instructors in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies were the most likely to include an AI policy in their syllabi, with 92 per cent — all but two of the syllabi obtained by the Gazette — discussing how it was to be used. Less than a quarter of syllabi from the faculties of Engineering, Science, Health Science and Music discuss AI use. Engineering is the lowest at just six per cent. Of the instructors who do mention generative AI in their syllabi, some patterns emerged across faculties. Just over one third specified that students
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