Richland Community College tackles addressing Chat GPT, AI

At its board meeting Tuesday, Laurie Hughes, professor of English, said that because of her particular area of expertise, she is most familiar with how AI affects students in that area of study, but AI is turning up in other areas as well.

Faculty at Richland have been working on studying existing college policies to see if a new one should be proposed, or if existing policies against plagiarism cover it.

“It’s a complicated issue,” Hughes told the board of trustees.  

Artificial intelligence refers to computer systems capable of performing complex tasks that historically only a human could do, such as reasoning, making decisions, or solving problems. 

In August of 2023, she said, faculty included a warning, which appears in the syllabus of all courses at the college, that using AI and presenting its work as one’s own is plagiarism. In March, faculty took part in a series of workshops, with a roundtable discussion planned for later this month, on ways to structure assignments to discourage the use of AI. Ideas included in-class, handwritten assignments and specific topics that would require the students to do the work themselves, as AI wouldn’t be able to address, for example, a student’s personal experience.

“It’s not a heavy-handed, ‘how can I catch you?’” Hughes said. “But crafting assignments that Chat GPT can’t do.”

Hughes said the way AI works is, it always has an answer, even if the program has to invent one and also invent citations, such as would be used in a research paper. She can usually recognize when a student has used it because she is familiar with her students’ own writing, an AI does not read like a human’s writing.

“Everybody is panicked, and everybody is struggling (in educational institutions),” she said.

In other business, board chairwoman Vicki Carr gave the oath of office to new student trustee Brayden Thomas, who is studying engineering at the college. 

Departing student trustee Austin Yutzky thanked the board for the chance to serve and said she’d learned a lot working with the board members.

“This is an experience I will take with me for the rest of my life,” she said. 

Isaac Zuniga, executive vice president of academics and student success, gave a report on the progression of the college’s 10-year accreditation with the Higher Learning Commission. He has a preliminary report of their review of the college, he said, but the official report will not be released until after the HLC’s meeting on April 29-30.

One of the things the HLC said needs improvement is the college assessment of student learning and use of data, and while the college does collect such data, he agreed that Richland could use that data more effectively and be more intentional in its collection.

“This is an opportunity to tell our story in a more accurate way,” he said. There are 121 institutions on HLC’s list of institutions that have areas that need improvement, he added, and the organization was impressed with many other things about Richland, such as its commitment to support services for students.

“With the comprehensiveness of their review, it would be hard to believe there’s nothing we need to work on,” Richland President Cris Valdez said.