Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership Statement on Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Higher education, scholarly publishing, and research are at a crossroads with Artificial Intelligence. Large language models (like Chat GPT), AI Assistants, and other generative AI are now able to reproduce and support many human tasks, allowing us to work better and more efficiently. While generative AI (GenAI) offers great potential, it also has presented challenges for use in doctoral writing and educational research, including but not limited to hallucinations and inaccurate information. Many students, scholars, and educators are questioning how to use GenAI in ethical and practical ways. As a program, we seek a balance between banning the use of GenAI and supporting the growing professional and educational uses of GenAI.
Consistent with academic publication practices, doctoral students are required to write for their coursework and dissertations themselves, and they must ensure clear ownership of their work. A human author has accountability for the work that they have produced. An AI text generator has no such accountability and cannot be held responsible for hallucinations, incorrect summaries, or incorrect data or analytic assumptions.
We believe expertise in an area of academic research requires direct engagement with the literature in the field; thus, we also expect students to read the published research and sources that they are citing to both build their professional expertise and to effectively build new knowledge.
We also believe that students need to have direct engagement with their data before and during any use of computer-assisted data analysis software (CADAS) and make transparent in their writing any use of CADAS and/or GenAI.
In summary, doctoral students have an ethical obligation to submit original writing that reflects human knowledge. If students elect to use AI, and in particular GenAI, as a resource, they must ensure it is to support, not replace, their work. When one’s name is attached to written work, the person is taking accountability for the authorship of that work.
Drafted: May 14, 2024
Revised: September 11, 2024 Adopted:
September 16, 2024