Alan Zehnder, Alexandra Werth, Chris Schaffer, David Goldberg,
Trystan Goetze and Kathryn Dimiduk
Last update 8/16/2025

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is poised to change how engineers and other professionals learn, work and approach problem solving. It is advancing so rapidly that many of us are grappling with its implications for education and our own teaching, research and day-to-day life. While GenAI promises to accelerate learning by scaling personal support, by enabling timely feedback, generating practice questions and quizzes¹, “There are legitimate worries that AI systems may provide a crutch for students, stifling the development of foundational skills needed to support higher-order thinking.”²

GenAI is here and students are using it with or without our guidance or permission. Results of the VPAI’s spring 2025 survey show that about 90% of our students are using GenAI. Google recently made their AI Pro Plan available at no cost to students.³ We, as faculty, have a responsibility to help our students learn effective and ethical use of GenAI.

Generative AI encompasses a wide range of tools and technologies. What they have in common is that GenAI tools can produce material—text, audio, images, 3D models, computer code, and so on—that would ordinarily require sustained human work to create, often merely from a text prompt entered by the user.  Cornell’s definition of GenAI.

Acknowledging that there is much we don’t know, this document is intended to provide base level guidance on principles, suggestions and resources regarding the integration of GenAI in instruction in the College of Engineering.

Principles⁴

Faculty are best judges of how, where and if to incorporate GenAI into instruction.

Academic Integrity must still hold. All work submitted by students to complete an assignment must reflect the student’s own understanding, regardless of GenAI use.

If GenAI is used to complete assignments, students are responsible for its accuracy. Learning to assess the accuracy, relevance and completeness of GenAI outputs is a key learning outcome of GenAI literacy.

If faculty or TAs use GenAI to create or edit course materials, they should model good practice and disclose its use to students. For example, “this question was generated by Copilot and edited by hand.”

AI should support, not replace, learning core engineering competencies. Assignments that allow use of GenAI must engage students deeply with foundational skills such as problemsolving, critical thinking, and design. The need for these skills will never become irrelevant.

Suggestions

Don’t Ignore GenAI

Don’t ignore the presence and widespread use by students of a variety of different GenAI products to generate text, code, images, CAD designs, slides, video, and audio.

Faculty Should be GenAI Literate

It is important for faculty to be GenAI literate. Reading about GenAI is a good place to start, but there is no substitute for trying it yourself. Take advantage of one of the workshops offered by CTI (see CTI workshops at end of document). Watch for GenAI lunch sessions from MTEI. Try experimenting on your own. You might, for example, try using GenAI as a thought partner to help you come up with ideas for assignments or new ways to explain concepts. For example, give the prompt “I am teaching a college-level engineering course in mechanics and materials. Generate two metacognitive questions as follow ups to the following question ...”, “Generate a think/pair/share activity for sophomore course in …. “, “Generate a worksheet for a discussion section that takes students through the process of generating a free body diagram. “

Acknowledge Challenges

You may find it helpful to acknowledge in class that GenAI is a new and rapidly evolving tool and that this is a learning journey you are embarking on with your students. Solicit student input and feedback. Co-create expectations on GenAI use with your students. Share an awareness that they will likely use GenAI in the workplace, but that they will also need to add their own value as an engineer and you are trying to guide them in developing the experience and expertise they will need.

Provide Guidance in your Syllabus

Students report that guidance from faculty on allowable uses of GenAI is often unclear. While there is no one rule that can apply to all courses, all instructors should clearly state in their syllabi whether, where, and how GenAI tools may be used by students to complete assignments and assessments. Be as specific as possible, as students and faculty may view general guidance very differently, what students must do on their own, where can they use GenAI for guidance, and where can they use GenAI output directly. In some cases, it may be necessary to specify rules around GenAI at the specific assignment level. Explain the rationale for your decisions to your students. See end of this document for sample syllabus statements.

Learning Outcomes and Assessment Strategies

Modify the course learning outcomes and assessment strategies to specify what students should be able to know and accomplish without the assistance from GenAI. Ensure that the assessments (e.g., exams, problem sets, or alternative forms) are intentionally designed to measure these outcomes and account for potential GenAI use, especially in take-home or unsupervised contexts. Consider focusing more on critical thinking and analysis, including reflective components such as asking students questions on underlying assumptions, or ask them to explain how the result would change if the assumptions were not valid.

Academic Integrity

GenAI brings significant academic integrity concerns to take home exams or any other high stakes assessment students conduct on their own. GenAI tools can answer many exam problems and detection of GenAI generated content is difficult. Faculty should get a sense of GenAI capabilities by having it complete the homework problems from your class, or by asking GenAI to solve your final exam questions from last year. Try using different tools. Be aware that paid versions of some GenAI tools may provide better answers and that providing prompts with more context and information may improve the solutions. If GenAI can solve your take-home exam question, rework the question, or move to in-person exams, or consider oral exams or a hybrid of take home and oral exams or in-person project presentations.

The Code of Academic Integrity states that students may not share course material without instructor permission. Note that uploading documents to GenAI tools is a form of sharing. If you do not want your course material uploaded to GenAI make that expectation clear to students in your syllabus and mention it explicitly in class.

Catching GenAI use where it is prohibited is difficult. You can almost never be certain that GenAI was used and GenAI detectors are not known to be reliable. Keeping that in mind, below are a few ways you might design assignments to support academic integrity.

• Have students work in front of you
• Count homework as a relatively small part of final grade while emphasizing its role
as practice to help students learn
• Incorporate personal reflection that GenAI can’t easily fake.
• Require the use of idiosyncratic technical terms that you use in your course but are
not in widespread use.

More detailed discussions will be posted in coming MTEI Fall Teaching Tips. Also, see the CTI resource: AI and Academic Integrity.

Resources

Sample Syllabus Statements

The three sample statements below follow the approaches defined by the 2023 Cornell report Generative Artificial Intelligence for Education and Pedagogy . Edit these statements as appropriate for your course and/or add specific guidelines either in the syllabus or on an assignment-by-assignment basis.

Alternately CTI has developed a matrix of AI Course Policy Icons that can be added to syllabi and assignments to help clearly convey course expectations with more nuance than the three basic approaches below.

Additional examples of syllabus statements

1. Prohibit use of GenAI where its use would substitute for or interfere with core learning objectives, particularly in courses where students are developing foundational knowledge or skills.

• Students are allowed to use GenAI tools for study-related purposes such as reviewing material, testing their understanding, and helping in understanding concepts. However, the use of GenAI to complete any part of assignments or assessments in this course is not allowed. This includes quizzes, exams, problem sets, design projects, coding, graphics and technical reports [add or subtract as appropriate to your course]. Learning comes through practice and effort. Offloading that effort to GenAI will impede your learning and development of core skills such as problem-solving and critical thinking. Submitting AI-generated work is a violation of academic integrity.

2. Allow with attribution the use of GenAI where it can serve as a useful resource to support higher level thinking or skill development.

• In this course, students may use GenAI tools as a resource to support high level thinking and skill development, such as exploring design alternatives, analyzing complex systems, or refining technical writing, provided that such use is properly acknowledged. You are responsible for the accuracy and completeness of GenAI generated work. Submitting AI-generated content as your own without disclosure is a violation of academic integrity. Be specific about how you used GenAI. If you are unsure whether GenAI use is appropriate for a specific task, please consult the instructor before proceeding. All use of GenAI must be acknowledged. [Provide students with guidance on acknowledgement, suggestions on how to format acknowledgements.]

3. Encourage use of GenAI in courses or assignments where it can be used as a tool to allow exploration and creative thinking, or level the playing field for students with disparate abilities and needs. In some cases, faculty may even require students to use GenAI, just be clear if that is the case and use tools that are available to students without cost, for example, Copilot.

• In this course, students are encouraged to use GenAI tools to explore ideas, enhance creativity, and support diverse learning needs provided that such use is properly acknowledged. You are responsible for the accuracy and completeness of GenAI generated work. Submitting work done by GenAI as your own without disclosure is a violation of academic integrity. If you are unsure whether AI use is appropriate for a specific task, please consult the instructor before proceeding.
  [Provide students with guidance on acknowledgement, suggestions on how to format acknowledgements.]

Resources from Cornell Center for Teaching Innovation

Generative Artificial Intelligence | Center for Teaching Innovation
AI & Academic Integrity | Center for Teaching Innovation

CTI instructional designers offer drop-in hours for faculty questions and our Creative Technology Lab offers consultations for more in-depth questions and concerns, along with a GenAI Playground where faculty can experience and experiment with a variety of the tools firsthand.

CTI Responding to Generative AI workshops: Built to meet the needs of instructors who want students to use GenAI tools and those who want to ensure GenAI tools don’t impede or replace important learning.

• “Learning Without AI: Designing Assignments and Course Policies” For faculty concerned about students bypassing the learning process by relying on GenAI tools.

o Register for Tuesday, September 2, 2025, from 2:30 – 3:45 p.m., in person.

• “Human-Centered GenAI for Teaching and Learning”: Offers guidelines and inspirations for developing assignments that incorporate GenAI, and explore what students need to know about responsible and effective GenAI use.

o Register for Thursday, August 21, 2025, from 11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m., in
person.
o Register for Thursday, September 11, 2025, from 1:30–2:45 p.m., in person.

External Resources

Reimagining STEM Learning Objectives in Response to Generative AI | Harvard
Bloom’s Taxonomy Revisited – Artificial Intelligence Tools – Faculty Support | Oregon
State

Reading

Should College Graduates Be AI Literate?
Your Students Need an AI-Aware Professor
AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking

References

¹ Yan, L., Greiff, S., Teuber, Z. et al. Promises and challenges of generative artificial intelligence for human learning. Nat Hum Behav 8, 1839–1850 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-02004-5

² https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-education-report-how-university-students-use-claude,
accessed 8/6/2025.

³ https://gemini.google/students/? utm_source=gemini&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=students_owned
_subscriptions-bannerr Students — get free Google AI Pro for a year accessed 8/7/2025

⁴ See also Cornell’s Core Principles for Generative AI in Education developed by the GenAI Education
Working Group and informed by preliminary results of the faculty and student surveys conducted spring ‘25.