It’s deadline season at KCL! After the holidays, it can be pretty hard to find time to dedicate to your assignments, especially if you’re still with your friends and family, or just in the process of moving back to campus.
Because of these difficulties, excessive reliance on generative AI can become pretty tempting. Let’s be clear: AI is not something you should completely refrain from using. Tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot have become so integral to our daily practices, that it’s not even a taboo anymore. We use AI chat boxes to write our work emails, Alexa’s to plan our grocery lists… Even Grammarly is practically built in our software, to help us from making any spelling mistakes. So, it would be quite unrealistic to ask you to go on a complete AI detox for your coursework.
KCL is very keen on encouraging the use of AI through ethical and responsible practices. The university’s staff is getting trained on how to teach classes with AI, and they have updated their assessment policy to make room for this new, interesting medium. To find out more about the specific regulations, you can read KCL’s comprehensive guide here.
Still, you definitely shouldn’t complete an assignment by copy-pasting a ChatGPT text! That’s why you need to understand what you can do with AI, and what instead constitutes academic misconduct and can severely penalize you. To help you navigate this ever-growing field of academic policies, here are some golden rules to follow on when and how to use AI to excel in your coursework:
Use it ahead of your assessment
KCL allows you to use ChatGPT or other generative AI tools to help you organize and structure your thoughts. For instance, you can ask ChatGPT to explain an essay question to you as if you were a 10-year-old: this will help you understand the basic guidelines of the assignment, and make sure you answer the question correctly.
You can also use ChatGPT to summarize complex concepts, to familiarize yourself with them; to organize your ideas so that you can plan out a structure; and even to rephrase your notes to make them clearer!
Know what you cannot do
While the prep work you need to plan your essay can be aided by ChatGPT, the piece of coursework itself cannot be done by AI. ChatGPT should be a tool to help you understand, digest, and organize ideas, but never to create them from scratch.
As a safety precaution, make sure that you do not end up using any text you got from generative AI in your final essay, as this can be marked as plagiarism. In a similar vein, some Departments will discourage you from using AI to translate an entire essay from your native to your target language. If you’re unsure about the specific policies that apply to your course, remember to check your Department handbook.
Give credit where credit is due
When you prepare your coversheet, you will be asked to state whether you used AI or not for that assessment. Don’t panic – it’s not a trick question! The examiner just wants to know if and how you used AI to aid your preparation for the assignment, according to the guidelines we explained above.
Now you can either declare that you have not used it at all, or specify where your work is supported by generative AI (such as by rewriting some passages of it, or in your understanding of the core concepts of the essay). To know exactly what to write in your acknowledgements, go to the section ‘How do I acknowledge the use of generative AI?’ on this KCL guide.
This is all you need to know about how to use AI and meet those deadlines! Remember to be confident in your own abilities and take some time away from your study sessions when you can. Once you have pressed that ‘submit’ button, or whenever you just need to take your mind off your duties, check out the KCLSU Events page for our Take Time Out activities!