With the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT, Queen’s published a set of guidelines for its use in academic settings in August 2023.
The guidelines asserted that Queen’s won’t proceed with banning the use of generative AI tools, but instead instructors will have the liberty to choose parameters of its use in their courses.
Since the publication of these guidelines, professors at Queen’s have taken varying approaches. Some have encouraged its use because they value AI literacy, for example, whereas others have penalized its use as they believe it prevents a full understanding of course materials.
The Journal spoke with four students across different faculties, each of whom used ChatGPT in ways that departed from academic integrity.
Amy*, Comm ’25, has used ChatGPT for a variety of nonacademic purposes, including generating potential interview questions when applying to clubs.
In the academic environment, she’s taken advantage of ChatGPT to convert rough ideas into paragraph form. She finds ChatGPT works best when it is given a lot of information prior to generating answers.
“If I’m trying to write an assignment from scratch, I find that ChatGPT doesn’t really hit the mark. I found it’s a better way to just come up with most of the ideas on my own, but then leave the bulk of the wording to ChatGPT,” Amy said in an interview with The Journal.
As a Commerce student, Amy finds herself working on a lot of writing-based assignments that use the same skill set ChatGPT offers.
“I had an assignment where we wrote memos. You have to basically summarize the points [of an article] in a way that’s digestible to, say, the CEO of the company. That’s basically what ChatGPT does best,” she said.
Among her peers in Commerce, Amy has noticed that while not everyone is using ChatGPT, its usage has ticked upward recently. She often hears comments like “just ChatGPT it” from her peers.
Amy alleged one of her peers used ChatGPT during an exam for an international business course.
“It was just a lot of short answer, long answer questions where we read a case and we answer a question about it using course material, linking back to course concepts. You can get by that exam quickly if you use ChatGPT. It can’t do all the work for you unless you feed [the course concepts] into the prompt.”
While she appreciates the convenience of ChatGPT, Amy believes it has weakened her ability to brainstorm and summarize ideas.
Despite its drawbacks, she wants to see ChatGPT integrated into academics because she has seen its use encouraged in work environments.
“I’ve never had an employer tell me ‘don’t use ChatGPT.’ In fact, sometimes, I’ve heard them say ‘just use ChatGPT, don’t spend too much time on this, we just want an email out,’” she said.
She believes ChatGPT should play a role in the future of academics because she thinks the current honour system in many of her courses penalizes students who follow the rules.
At the same time, Amy acknowledged normalized use of ChatGPT in academics could have an unintended effect: unreasonably raising the standards for writing assignments.
Amy’s not the only person who has deferred to ChatGPT for written assignments. When it comes to getting essays for his philosophy courses submitted on time, Timothy*, ArtSci ’24, has found ChatGPT to be an essential resource.
He has also used ChatGPT to summarize long readings and save on time. While he first thought ChatGPT wasn’t useful, Timothy discovered giving ChatGPT specific information improved the quality of its output.
However, he found ChatGPT is isn’t helpful for all his classes. When it comes to his economics courses, ChatGPT hasn’t been able to help Timothy with tasks such as graphing.
Timothy has appreciated ChatGPT for its ability to his painting business.
“In of captions on posts for social media and email templates for bulk emails, ChatGPT helps revise and smooth them out. It does save me a lot of time to do things that are more worthwhile than sitting down and handwriting specific emails tailored to each person I’m working with,” he said in an interview with The Journal.
Timothy believes a key consequence of ChatGPT’s rise is that it will force education to transition to more of an in-person format. Rather than take-home assignments, which are prime material for students to use ChatGPT, he predicts there will be more presentations and in-person tests.
Benjamin*, Sci ’26, has taken advantage of ChatGPT to understand concepts that his professors are often unable to properly explain.
“In of my use [of ChatGPT], with certain concepts like MOSFETs [metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors], I’ll search on ChatGPT ‘please explain MOSFETs to me’ and then build my understanding off that and ask additional questions to reinforce my understanding,” Benjamin said in an interview with The Journal.
Benjamin leveraged ChatGPT’s abilities to complete work in his design courses.
In these courses, he must often complete weekly reports that provide updates on a semester-long project.
“It’s a lot easier to ask tools like ChatGPT to spew out some text and you might tailor it a bit [for these weekly reports],” he said.
However, Benjamin has been more careful recently in of his ChatGPT use because of a recent cheating scandal in the engineering faculty.
“In the fall term, in our data structures course, there was a cheating scandal involved with ChatGPT. Fortunately, I wasn’t involved, but it involved a lot of people taking code from each other but also using ChatGPT to generate code. ChatGPT outputs really similar code for most people.”
Benjamin aims to reduce his reliance on generative AI tools because he believes that over reliance will widen the learning gaps between him and his peers who don’t rely on these tools.
“I guess for writing code, ChatGPT, for the most part, can do a pretty good job at giving decent enough code that will probably run. The issue with that is that you’re mes your understanding of the content because you’re not actually learning and you’re just complicating things, and that has a big snowball effect.”
In his courses, he has mostly seen his professors taking a strict approach that prohibits the use of generative AI tools. James*, HealthSci ’25, has used ChatGPT in various areas of his life—ranging from figuring out what to cook with the ingredients he has in his fridge to coming up with ideas for club events.
However, when it comes to his academics, James told The Journal he has seldom used it in an ethical manner.
When he was working on an assignment about a specific drug, James used ChatGPT to find research articles related to that drug. He proceeded to use ChatGPT to also write the actual assignment.
When it comes to finding research papers for his assignments, James has found ChatGPT to be a much more navigable tool than conventional research databases like PubMed.
However, he believes his writing skills have stagnated and even worsened due to his dependency on ChatGPT.
“On a personal level, I think [dependency on ChatGPT] can lead to regression in the sort of skills you’re meant to be developing during an undergraduate degree,” he said in an interview with The Journal.
James has been particularly concerned by how his professors have handled the use of ChatGPT in academic settings. He pointed out how some of his professors have claimed they’re using AI detection software.
“None of the AI detection softwares are reliable and there are issues with using a third-party software that’s not approved by the University and exposing students’ copyrighted assignments to that third-party software without their consent.”
Research has shown that AI detection softwares are often inconsistent and produce many false positives, meaning that human-written text is frequently flagged as AI-generated by these softwares.
With respect to the future of generative AI tools in academics, he’s excited by the prospect of these tools facilitating the personalization of education.
“If an AI software can somehow compile all the personality traits and statistics and history of a certain person and figure out the best way to disseminate that information to them, I think it’ll only be a benefit to the education of humanity. It means that every single person can learn at the most efficient pace that they can,” Benjamin said.
*Names protected for safety reasons.
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A.B
It would be good to see the Queen’s Journal sit down and talk to the underpaid and overworked graduate students who have to mark the majority of these ChatGPT assignments, often spending extra time trying to students and provide thorough for improvement, while these students smugly brag about ChatGPT being an “essential resource.” More needs to be done about this and the Queen’s Journal should interview those of us who are on the other side.