09/22/2025

This Fall, Trim Those AI Syllabus Statements

by Joseph Brown

(Image credit: Joseph Brown)

It’s fall, and it's time to prepare for the season. Here in Colorado, it means exchanging shorts for flannel, trimming the yard for its final form through winter, and watching the aspens turn that bright gold that heralds the season in the mountains.

It also means that, at this point in the term, I’ve read a lot of syllabus statements on generative AI and academic integrity. And I’m here to tell you, it is time for a seasonal trimming of those too.

The verbose generative AI statement once served us well. The longer, august statements (usually featuring a preamble) helped when our worry was that our students or our colleagues (and administration) didn’t know enough about what AI was or how it could figure into our classes. That time has passed.

Why We Have These Statements

Just to reset for a moment, it’s important to remember why we have these statements.

1. They exist to give guidance: they aid learning and help prevent misunderstanding. They don’t necessarily teach, but they do help a student’s learning.
2. They exist for administrative reasons: when something undesirable occurs in a class, they are what we point to as the justification for our intervention.

Keeping these purposes in mind, we should encourage faculty to draft for clarity and brevity.

The Goal: Clarity and Brevity

Clarity

Our goal should be this: a student should be able to decipher a policy at about the same speed they can read a fast food restaurant menu.

I’m not being flippant. And yes, I’m often the frustrated guy standing behind the person at the counter, acting like they’ve never seen a fast-food menu before.

When a student reads a syllabus, they have some idea of why they’re there (Humanities folks call this the “rhetorical situation”). When they get to the section titled, “AI Use Statement,” their purpose for reading and their focus narrow. At that point, most students are asking one question: “Can I use AI here?”

Why not just answer that question in a few simple steps? Here’s how.

Brevity: Four Questions to Answer

An ideal AI syllabus statement should answer four basic questions students are asking:

1. What parts of the course does this policy cover (just assignments & assessments OR are we talking how they organize, study, etc)?
2. What am I allowed to do OR What am I prohibited from doing?
3. Is there a graph, chart, framework that I need to understand for this policy to make sense?
4. What happens next if I have a question about this?

Putting it Into Practice: Sample Statements

So, a sample statement then looks something like this:

A Prohibitive Statement:

You may NOT use AI when completing any assignments, assessments, or other work for credit in this course. You MAY use it to investigate, study, summarize, etc. course material, concepts, etc. Here is a color-coded framework that we will be using to help make this distinction clearer (Sample Link to Framework). If you have questions about this policy, come talk to me!

A Permissive Statement:

You may only use generative AI in this class in specific ways. I will use a color-coded framework to make it clear HOW you can use AI and WHEN you can use it. You can find that framework here (Sample Link to Framework), and we will discuss how you may use AI on each course assignment or assessment at the time it is introduced. If you have questions about this policy, come talk to me!

Each of these statements clock in at four sentences long. Both cover the major questions students have about potential use. Both provide the necessary basis for any accountability process your university uses.

Preparing for Next Season

When I was a boy, I hated raking the leaves the two massive oak trees in our yard dropped in autumn. But now, I miss a lot of that experience: the crunching sound they made underfoot, the deep, colorful bed they left on the yard, and even the smokey smell that lingered into the chilly nights when we burned the great piles of them. The thing I miss most is the seasonal rhythm they ushered in. The leaves gave us blessed shade in the heat of summer and an occasion to be outside as the season turned and the weather grew chilly. But raking them up before winter was also how we prepared for spring.

Like those leaves, trimming these policies helps us prepare for what’s next. I’m hopeful it’s going to be a beautiful spring.