Classes are going to look a little different for the University of Chicago’s first year law students.
On Thursday, the law school said it was banning the use of phones, tablets, and even laptops in class for freshman-level courses, as it rejigs its curriculum to be more “AI-resilient” and encourage more deliberate use of the tech.
An announcement from the school didn’t explicitly mention AI cheating. But the changes come amid a backdrop of significant public concern over generative AI’s impact on education, and plunging literacy and numeracy skills among students.
“With AI disrupting higher education, our commitment to rigorous legal education also must mean openness to even rapid adaptation,” the statement said.
Device bans are not unusual in classrooms. Rarely, however, do they extend to laptops, and they’re typically enforced at an instructor’s discretion, rather than as a university-wide policy. The university claims the decision was made after both faculty and students reported positive effects after some professors experimented with device bans.
It’s just one of the few ways Chicago Law aims to tightly control how its students access AI tech. According to its new AI strategy statement, exams will be taken in-class without access to the internet and apps. Students will also have to take part in oral discussions with their professors about their research papers.
It’s far from a sweeping AI ban, however. The school still wants to prepare students for an AI-driven world, with the goal of steering them “toward using AI in ways that promote learning rather than inhibit it,” clinical professor Mark Templeton, who serves on Chicago Law’s AI Committee, said in a statement.
University figures, in fact, go to great pains to make clear they’re not shutting the door on AI completely.
“If you want to use AI as a study partner, if you want to use AI to ingest your notes from class and then create questions to quiz you on the material, that’s great,” said William Hubbard, a professor of law and economics and chair of the AI Committee, in the statement. “That’s not a shortcut. There are ways that using AI can strengthen the learning process and that’s what we’re trying to lean into.”
Major AI cheating scandals have already hit some of the country’s top institutions. A professor at Brown University recently uncovered a massive AI cheating ring in what might be the largest scandal of its kind in Ivy League history, suspecting that over half his students cheated on an exam using a chatbot. Princeton University recently dropped its over century-old Honor Code tradition by forcing students to be supervised to take their exams, as suspicion of AI cheating rattled the schools.
Chicago Law’s AI crackdown could also be seen as a response to the poor example set by the professionals in the practice. Countless lawyers have been admonished by judges after submitting court filings riddled with clear AI hallucinations, from references to made-up case law to mis-attributed quotes.
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