WA high school students warned against using artificial intelligence tools as new policies introduced

WA’s Year 11 and 12 students are being warned that handing in work generated by artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT without attribution is cheating and will be penalised. ChatGPT, a powerful chatbot which can respond to questions and produce essays within seconds, has sparked widespread debate among educators at schools and universities since its release two months ago. WA’s School Curriculum and Standards Authority on Tuesday updated its official policies to include references to the new threat to academic integrity. The authority’s manual on WA Certificate of Education requirements and its sample senior secondary assessment policy state that schools must have confidence when marking assessments that they are the students’ own work. The sample assessment policy, which most schools adopt, now states that students are not permitted to hand in work as their own that has been copied or downloaded from the internet, “including artificial intelligence applications (AIA) generated responses”, without acknowledging the source. If a student is found to have cheated, they could receive zero marks for all or part of the assessment task. It comes after the WA Education Department on Monday revealed its decision to block ChatGPT from all public school sites and devices. WA is the fourth Australian State after NSW, Queensland and Tasmania to block public schools’ access to the technology. South Australia has opted not to ban it. Education Department director-general Lisa Rodgers said this week she had decided to block it from the school network because teachers needed to be able to tell what students know and don’t know. “We really do want to see students’ genuine work, because we need to know what their critical gaps are,” she said. While she acknowledged students might still resort to ChatGPT outside school for homework tasks, Ms Rodgers said teachers had “pretty good radar” on whether it was their pupils’ own work. Catholic Education WA said it was still in the process of assessing ChatGPT, as it did many new technologies and apps, for its teaching and learning implications as well as child safety and online security risks.