Rachel Forsyth
Unit for Educational Services, Lund University
Responses
Should a student use GenAI to polish their text?
The instruction that it's ok to use GenAI to 'polish the text' seems pretty common in higher education research, from bachelors to doctoral level. I recently read this in an explanation of how someone used GenAI "I used AI tools, as is accepted academic practice, to check phrasing and suggest alternative wording." (I'm not providing the source for this because it was in the context of someone defending GenAI use and I don't want us to be distracted by this particular example). I would dispute that it is accepted academic practice in all disciplines, but this depends on one's interpretation of checking and polishing. It is definitely accepted to use a thesaurus to suggest alternative word choices, for instance, and GenAI might offer this plus some help with choosing more common prepositions or verbs or context to make the alternative words sit better in the sentence. If you are writing in a second or third language, you might lack confidence in every single sentence. And as checking individual words is a tedious process, the temptation to do a block check and replace of the whole document is surely very, very, high. How many words need to be changed by the GenAI product for this to become more than checking and polishing? My experience in reviewing scientific papers in education is that it is very easy for a document to look polished but for paragraphs to lose their connection to one another, making the whole very difficult to read. Here's what I suggest: the student and supervisor need to talk about what they mean by these kinds of vague phrases. Try out different approaches together with your real text, and discuss what happens to the text and if the final output is acceptable in your discipline area. Just having the conversation and practice will help you both to come up with a definition which works for your research, and will help the supervisor give more specific advice to the next student.
Pros and cons of using AI-generated podcasts as teaching materials?
I also picked up on the 'students aren't reading any more' point that Mirjam mentioned, and wanted to add a suggestion, to think about cultivating a culture of reading in your classes. One obvious way is for you to talk about why reading is important to learning, and you can also build in discussions about what has been read into class. This paper from Norway (open access) looks at academic reading as a social practice, and includes a template for organising the activity: Afdal, H. W., Spernes, K., & Hoff-Jenssen, R. (2023). Academic reading as a social practice in higher education. Higher Education, 85(6), 1337–1355. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00893-x . If you don't feel like reading the whole paper (I do realise that is ironic in the context of this question, but you may not be an education researcher!) then this extract may be useful: "The initial aims when developing the design of the academic reading seminar were that the activity should. Provide an environment where academic reading is a social activity Initiate critical academic reading for the purpose of understanding, not just remembering Initiate critical discussions on research methods, quality of academic texts, genre, and trustworthiness in academic texts Provide the opportunity to connect resources acquired through academic reading with the genre of the discipline Give opportunities to make sense of, and use theoretical and professional concepts (meaning making) actively in discussions Initiate discussions where the students might relate research to their teaching practice and vice versa" Give it a try!
I am worried about the environmental impact of using AI. How bad is it really?
This is a good website to use with students : What Uses More? Compare the environmental footprint of digital tasks It leads to discussion about how we consume digital resources more generally. Those students who refuse to use GenAI for environmental reasons should have a right to do so, but should they be refusing other things too? And are they potentially missing out on learning about/with/for certain things which are genuinely important in the curriculum? The answers are context-specific and should be discussed with colleagues and students.
How can I approach a student if I suspect that they have used AI in ways that aren’t allowed (but I don’t have proof)?
The first question in a Swedish context is "are you being misled?", since that's how we consider academic dishonesty. In other countries, cheating may have a more specific definition with institutional rules about what constitues dishonesty, so check those rules first. If you are being misled, then somewhere it must have been communicated to the student that using GenAI is not allowed. Then, you have to reliably detect it, which as Mirjam has already said, is pretty much impossible. It's possible to invite all students in for a discussion about their work after submission, to probe their understanding and adjust the grade, but in many countries, including Sweden, it's not ok (legally) to single out specific students for this based on your suspicions, so you'd need to talk to all of them individually. Probably not feasible. So take Mirjam's good advice, but don't stress over what's already happened. If the examination/assessment was critical (might lead to serious consequences like a collapsed bridge or the wrong medication) it would already have been supervised. But plan differently for next time: 1) Be very clear from the beginning of the course what is acceptable, and why. Try our 'CanAI' tool to generate useful guidance for students. Have a look at this guidance for students which is freely available and which attempts to explain why we might have certain expectations. 2) Review your grading criteria to include the quality of writing/communication and downgrade bland slop-type output (words like original, thought-provoking, contextual might help you here) 3) Consider changing the assessment to include information about how GenAI was used as part of the methods of the work, to encourage honest declaration and discussion. This might be possible as part of the assignment description, so that you don't need to change the entire course plan / module specification. 4) If it's logistically possible, consider a formative submission where you can give early feedback on a draft which can include comments like "this doesn't look like your own voice" which is then just a comment and not linked to a grade. You can use most of your feedback effort at this stage and tell students they will just get a grade on the final submission, because the formative feedback is relational and thus more useful (Winstone et al 2026). Winstone, N. E., Gravett, K., Bearman, M., Noble, C., Jensen, L. X., Jones, A., & Nicola-Richmond, K. (2026). The care-full craft of feedback in an age of generative AI. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2026.2643333