Fear that students will short-circuit their learning and stunt their character growth by using artificial intelligence has led Covenant College’s Biblical and Theological Studies Department to make its own department-wide AI policy.
“We thought it made more sense for us to have a kind of document, a policy that is consistent across all our courses,” said Dr. Hans Madueme, professor of the Bible department, whose personal policy from last year was used as the starting point for the department’s policy.
The policy states that students are not permitted to use any form of AI, except as a grammar and spellcheck. This includes using AI for research and brainstorming.
The goal is to encourage students to do the work and grow because AI “can short-circuit growth,” as it states in the policy.
The policy even goes so far as to state that, “Using AI tools to generate writing will not merely foster laziness, but it especially denies you the privilege of learning and growing in your liberal arts education.”
It is not only a student’s academic integrity at stake for using AI but also multiple aspects of their character. Not only will a student who uses AI be considered a cheater but also lazy and stagnant, as multiple professors and the handbook have said.
“In the doing of the things is where character and virtue are built,” Dr. Clifton Ward, chair of the department, said, expressing fear of the non-development of students’ character.
Even modifying the policy to only allow the use of AI for research was looked at very disapprovingly by the professors of the Bible department.
“The more careful, more stringent option that I’m in favor of institutionally removes that temptation so that [AI] is not an option,” Madueme stated.
Without slowing down to research and write the old school way, Ward said students are missing out on a “good gift of God” that comes from working out those particular muscles, such as in brainstorming and research.
“I want to see human processes prized in a way that it is not in AI,” Ward said.
All of this theorizing and policy-making is striving to provide a setting for learning where students can grow and learn how to think critically. Then, they can apply it to the world of AI.
“When I’m using [AI] or when others are using it who are graduates, they’ve gone through that process, and they know how to think,” Madueme stated. “If a college student has never gone through that … you go straight to AI … you have a whole generation who doesn’t know how to think critically.”
Currently, Covenant has no policy for AI use across the campus. Administrators are leaving it up to individual departments and professors for now, though Ward said a team is being put together to figure out a solution for the issue of AI in the classroom.
“There is a group of faculty and staff around campus who are trying to come up with a working group to… think about whether there should be a campus wide policy,” he said.