For Faculty

The University Writing Program (UWP) affirms that writing is a multifaceted process that develops students’ ideas, expressive identities, critical capacities, and more. Generative AI (GenAI) tools are increasingly part of the writing and communication landscape, and our classrooms are spaces where students and instructors may engage critically with these technologies.

UWP instructors may differ in how they integrate or restrict GenAI use. To protect and respect instructors’ academic freedom, each faculty member retains the right to set the classroom policy that best aligns with their pedagogical goals and ethical beliefs. Some courses may encourage experimentation with AI for scaffolded tasks like brainstorming, feedback, or revision. Others may prohibit its use or employ it in limited ways, such as supporting research comprehension, identifying key words, improving grammar, or analyzing data.

All students in UWP courses should expect the following shared commitments and principles regarding the potential use of Generative AI–principles that we also believe could guide writing-intensive course instruction across campus:

• Student Expressive Identity and Learning: Students’ thinking, analysis, and writing are central to their success in college-level composition courses and beyond. GenAI tools should never replace students’ own intellectual work.
• Writing as a Process. All UWP courses approach writing as a process that includes various forms of brainstorming, drafting, feedback, and revision. GenAI can be useful in different stages of this process, but should not supplant students’ commitment to growth, reflection, and critical thinking.
• Contextual Use: Appropriate and ethical use of GenAI depends on purpose, audience, and genre. What may be acceptable in certain contexts may not be acceptable in others. Students should learn to navigate these distinctions, guided by course-specific policies and in-class instruction.
• Critical Engagement and Literacy: Any use of GenAI requires careful attention to bias, accuracy, originality, and ethical considerations. Developing such critical AI literacy is a key part of preparing students for future contexts.
• Equity and Access: We recognize that not all students come to college with equal access to GenAI tools. UWP faculty strive to design assignments and activities that do not disadvantage students based on technology access.
• Collaborative Responsibility: GenAI can be used most responsibly when students and instructors work together to develop shared norms for its use. The UWP encourages open dialogue about AI use, including recognition of students’ right to opt out of AI use and complete alternative assignments, when pedagogically appropriate and feasible.
• Student Transparency: If GenAI use is permitted in a course, students are expected to clearly document how they used it (including prompts and outputs) according to the instructor’s guidelines and professional best practices. The Purdue OWL offers suggestions for citation in multiple styles. 
• Academic Integrity: Submitting AI-generated content as your own work without transparency may constitute a violation of academic honesty policies and may carry consequences consistent with RIT’s Student Academic Integrity Policy.
• Further Ethical Considerations: The UWP also encourages critical awareness of broader ethical issues related to GenAI, such as environmental impacts, loss of human agency, threats to privacy, lack of transparency in decision-making, embedded stereotypes, labor displacement, and lack of oversight.
• Instructor Transparency: UWP faculty model transparency by sharing when and how they may use AI in course design, providing feedback, or other instructional elements.

Each instructor will provide an overview of their course-specific GenAI policy in class and in their syllabus that aligns with the above principles and reflects their unique pedagogical approach. Students are responsible for understanding and following their instructor’s policy. Together, these shared commitments ensure that the UWP remains a place where writing is pursued with integrity, creativity, curiosity, and intellectual rigor, even as we adapt to and critically examine emerging technologies.

Best practices, resources, and pedagogical guidance are available from the Modern Language Association (MLA) and Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) GenAI Joint Task Force. The Association for Writing Across the Curriculum (AWAC) also has a statement specifically for writing instructors across the university.