Discussion Board

In this AI era, students using AI to rewrite an essay seem to be very common. Actually, to a certain extent, AI could really help us a lot when we are working on an essay.  The issue in this case is that the student didn't acknowledge the usage, which means the student presented the work as his or her own effort. The appropriate way could be with the aid of AI to brainstorm some of the ideas and write them in his or her own words. To prevent similar issues in the future, teachers could give clearer and detailed guidelines for students to use the AI tool.

The ethical dilemma I observed involves an English class where the teacher used an AI system exclusively to grade pre-class presentations. This resulted in universally low and overly simplistic scores. The core ethical issue is assessment fairness and transparency. The AI graded mechanically based solely on the pronunciation of individual words, completely ignoring critical factors like a student's poise, content logic, body language, and overall fluency. This constitutes an irresponsible and unfair assessment method.

An appropriate action would be for the teacher to communicate the limitations of AI grading to the students and re-evaluate the scores. A more responsible approach would be an "AI-assisted, teacher-led" model, where the AI provides data on basics like pronunciation, but the teacher makes the final, holistic judgment.

To prevent this, schools should establish clear guidelines defining AI's role as an aid in assessment, not the authority. Teachers should be encouraged to design rubrics that include process evaluation and multiple criteria to ensure assessments accurately reflect students' comprehensive abilities.

I remember that a professor from a mainland university downloaded one published English academic paper from internet, and translate the whole paper into Chinese, and then republished that in a Chinese academic journal, without acquiring the consent from the author. This is absolutely plagiarism as he directly used other's ideas and other' words for his own academic achievement. If he really values this paper as good, then he must cite that he is translating, rather than writing something new and of himself. A cross-language and cross-region academic checking system is necessary for preventing the occurrence of the similar cases.

I am here to share one of my experiences when learning in an English course. In this course, the teacher employs AI tools to assess all students' presentations, with acknowledgment, of course. However, I believe such action may fail or undermine the teacher's role and uniqueness in this class. Although the number of students is huge, maybe it's easier for the teacher to use AI for assessment. I think the teachers can employ more TAs to assist with the assessment. I think for future cases, the university can lower the teachers' workload or recruit more TAs to prevent teachers from using AI assessment.

Digital ethic is definitely a important topic and interesting topic in nowadays life. As we students, we need to handle with mountains of course work or some research work everyday. Thus, with the help of ai we do reduce lots of stress from these unavoidable work so that we can spend some time on what we really interesting in or something more need to do. But as for these "ai Work", are there really responsible for the teacher or are there really helpful to our study?

When I was grading undergraduate students' assignments several weeks ago as a TA (it's a kind or creative writing based on personal expereinces), most students wrote sincerely, with more or less spelling or grammar mistakes. However, there was a student that did a perfect job without any mistakes. When I checked more carefully, I found that the personal expression in the essay, though beautifully written, was kind of general and hollow. I doubted if this essay was totally generated by AI, but I didn't want to misjudge either. So in the end I gave the student a relatively high score (not the best as the content is not good enough, but you can never say that writing in a certain style is WRONG in creative writing). I feel that this is a kind of dilemma like a student asking you for a leave because she/he has a stomachache. You must say yes no matter it's the real situation or an excuse. But I still wonder if it's fair to other students if a student using AI can get a higher score.

I suspected that some groups' presentations were generated by AI. Since they need to work on the presentations based on the same script, there are a few similarities, and they seemed not familiar with what was written on the slides, especially in the analysis part. I can totally understand if they use AI to rephrase or paraphrase different translations or editions of the script, or to beautify/enhance their slides. However, the analysis part is the most critical part of the AMs, as it drives the students to reach the LOs, thus I really want to see their personal insights and analysis to see what they've learned and how I can help as the TA.

To address this, I ask questions based on what they presented or the script to make sure everyone was engaged in the TLAs. However, the presentation was difficult to discern where AI has been employed, and equally challenging to point out evidence of its use in oral presentations.

When I did TA during my master, there was a student, whose assignment showed 85% AI on Turnitin. That assighment was a qualitative research using in-depth interviews. I emailed this student and required 2-3 pages of the transcripts. Sadly, the transcripts showed >90% AI on Turnitin. The student was a quiet person and never late/absent for class, I wondered why, so I did a face-to-face meeting with that student. Instead of blaming, I asked the student "Is everything okay in your life or your study?" , suddenly the student cried and said "I planned to interview 15 people, but only 4 agreed to take my interview. I would rather make up the rest 11 transcripts than admitting my failure in connecting with people!" ......Everything went clear. I told the student, "Please change your focus from 'what you do not have (the 11 people)' to 'what you already have (the 4 people)', go deeper into the existing 4 transcripts, and rewrite your assignment. Honesty is the biggest success." Then after the meeting, I invited the course instructor to give some suggestions on finding interviewees and sending interview invitations to that student.

A few years ago, there was a collaboration between CityU’s School of Creative Media and the ICC to display student artworks on the ICC façade. The brief stated that works would be reviewed by a committee including ICC representatives and had to comply with “ICC policy and ethics as elaborated in the display guidelines of Sun Hung Kai Properties.” Although students could access these guidelines, they had little say in shaping them. The ethical issue lies in how such collaborations position students within corporate frameworks, where creative expression must align with private standards. It raises broader questions about autonomy and consent in educational partnerships, and how universities can safeguard integrity while working with commercial institutions.

I used to face a real dilemma during my master's studies. A student used AI to write the final dissertation but still got his master degree smoothly and he did not acknowledge it. In his case, he violated the principles of honesty, fairness, responsibility and courage, his actions constituted data falsification, cheating and plagiarism. The appropriate response would be reported the issue to his supervisor or relavant office. To provent similar issues happened again, universities should use detection tools to check if the dissertation was written by AI and provide clearer guidelines on AI use.