A new draft policy proposal discourages Wake teachers’ use of artificial intelligence detectors, requires students to acknowledge and explain their use of AI, and elaborates in greater detail on how AI may be used ethically.
The four-page policy elaborates on skills the district wants students and staff to learn and standards the district wants them to meet.
It’s much more detailed than earlier versions of a policy and than adopted policies around the Triangle and surrounding region.
Development of an AI policy is one part of addressing a technology already disrupting education in Wake’s classrooms and classrooms across the world, leading to fears of stifled learning and disengagement.
The school board’s policy committee is set to decide Wednesday whether to recommend the policy move forward. The board wouldn’t vote on the policy until likely August, which, by rule, would require approval at two separate meetings.
The board and school district haven’t moved quickly to adopt an artificial intelligence policy, largely sticking with internal guidance while most other school districts adopt the same stock few paragraphs committing to AI literacy and academic integrity.
But whatever the school board may end up adopting could need to be revised in the near future.
House Bill 301 would require the State Board of Education to adopt age-appropriate standards for instructing students on AI literacy, developed by the Friday Institute at North Carolina State University. It would then approve a model AI policy for local school boards like Wake to adopt.
That model policy would touch on topics now covered in Wake’s latest draft, including measures for data privacy and security and standards for AI use.
Different versions of the bill have passed the House and the Senate, and the Senate’s version — the latest version — is now before a House committee.
Publicly discouraging the use of AI detectors
Wake’s new draft AI policy says it “does not support” a tool used by many educators to evaluate whether a student used generative AI to complete an assignment.
Generative artificial intelligence is a tool that creates something based on an input, using years of information learned over the Internet to almost instantaneously respond to any prompt. Students can use it to help them research a paper or to write the paper entirely.
Many teachers have taken to using detectors that claim to be able to estimate how much of an assignment was completed by AI. Those tools have been discouraged by many experts, including the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, because they are error-prone, producing both false positives and false negatives.
That’s a problem a Green Hope High School student said resulted in her receiving a zero on an essay she wrote herself.
This spring, Eleanor De Coster Canina called on the school board to prohibit the use of detectors.
District officials say internal district guidance for employees discourages the use of AI detectors. WRAL News requested that guidance last month but had not received it as of Tuesday afternoon.
Without public guidance, a student may not know that their teacher was discouraged from using an AI detector.
Using AI ethically
The draft policy calls unauthorized or undisclosed use of AI tools to complete schoolwork “academic misuse.” That would be addressed via the school board’s honor code and code of conduct policies.
The honor code policy addressed cheating, plagiarism, falsification and deceit. Under the honor code, a student could be required to redo an assignment or be disciplined more broadly, such as affecting a student’s eligibility for certain activities.
The draft before the school board calls for a human-centered approach to AI use in schools, including human oversight of any AI use.
Any use of AI for “official purposes” by staff or students would need to be disclosed and explained.
Staff use should promote engagement in authentic learning, the draft reads.
Students should do the same and avoid overreliance on AI. Students would only be able to use AI if authorized by their teacher and would need to explain it.
While the draft policy outlines rules, it doesn’t outline how the district would ensure compliance. Enforcement is often not included in policies but rather in internal procedures documents that can be more quickly edited because they don’t require school board approval.
Many students have told WRAL News that their classmates use AI to cut corners on their schoolwork. Many teachers, fearing that students will use AI and fail to learn new material, often avoid assignments that use technology at all.
DPI’s AI guidance, first issued in January 2024, includes an appendix of sample assignments that would use AI but require student actions intended to keep them engaged rather than simply going back to AI to complete the assignment.
For math lessons, DPI suggests students — rather than, say, solve for a variable in a typical algebraic equation — should use AI to create models for real-life scenarios to determine possible choices and evaluate the quality of those choices.
In a social studies class, students could use AI to draft arguments in a modern policy debate in 18th-century style, then compare rhetorical techniques from different eras. Or they could use AI to write three explanations for why the American Revolution occurred and evaluate each one against primary documents.
