Students talk on AI’s role in education

On Oct. 20, a student panel made up of students from across UWRF sat down in the

Kinnickinnic River Theater to discuss their experiences with AI, concerns about AI, and faculty

enforcement of AI policies.

Professor Cyndi Kernahan, who organized the panel, recognized that “AI is hard. It's very hard

for instructors. I know it's very hard for students to know how to use it, what to do with it.

Everybody's kind of been left on their own, because the disciplines are very different from each

other, teachers have different styles, and it's extremely time consuming also to figure out what

should I be doing, which tools should I even use? We've gotten a lot of conflicting information as

teachers.”

Concerns raised by students about AI were far reaching. Rowan Snay said “At what point would

you give the diploma to the AI program rather than the student, just because you can generate

pages upon pages of material and study work, but none of it is going to matter unless the

student actually wants to learn.”

Tanner Kaufman said “If you got a class where the teacher's not detecting it and 80 of the kids in

the class are getting an A and you're busting your butt to get a B, it puts students in a real hard

spot. Because then well, do I use ChatGPT to get that A? And so I think it puts students in a

morally hard position, especially athletes that are crushed on time.”

Zoe Gustafson said “I don't think that any of the benefits that AI could hypothetically provide are

worth the environmental cost that is associated with it. AI uses a lot of resources, water

specifically. But a lot of data centers that run generative AI like bots are in the American

Southwest, which is a very dry area. So a lot of the water that's being used there would be

better spent on the residents and the farmland there.”

UWRF currently doesn’t have a universal policy on AI, leaving policies up to individual faculty

members. However, the students on the panel were quite split on whether an universal AI policy

would be a good idea.

Tyler Dean, one of the students on the panel said “I think a policy for each department would be

good idea because I know for me in one of my history classes I got in trouble for using

Grammarly, whereas in my education classes they're telling me what to type in a chat GPT to

get a good lesson plan. So I'm like no Grammarly in this class, but chat gpt is okay in this class.”

However another student on the panel, Tanner Kaufman said “I personally think it'd be really

helpful to have a university wide policy. You go to five different classes and then you have five

different teachers being like, we totally understand. You got one teacher, who’s like we get it, we

understand that you're a college kid and then maybe your next professor who's kind about it too,

but we don't accept AI. So then you're stuck in a middle ground.”