Graphic by Gabriella Rodriguez ’27
A photo inside the Mount Holyoke Library.
Aoife Paul Healy ’26
Staff Writer
If Mount Holyoke College is truly concerned with making innovative, adventurous education available to its students, then why is its administration limiting our resources and refusing to adapt our academic policies as technology progresses? Artificial intelligence is a polarizing new sector of technology rife with ethical issues and questionable privacy possibilities. AI has been known to perpetuate biases, spread misinformation, collect invasive amounts of online data and lift information from existing spaces online without proper accreditation or permission. Despite this, AI is still used and experimented with — often enough that, according to a survey by BestCollege, 56% of undergraduate and graduate students admitted to using AI on their assignments or exams.
As its administration is well aware, Mount Holyoke is no exception to this. As of spring 2024, the Library, Information, and Technology Services Educational Technology team has made an artificial intelligence guide for professors, which is also accessible to students via Moodle. The guide is informational — not directive — and encourages professors to learn more about the technology and to change their syllabi at their discretion. Clearly, MHC’s LITS has extensively researched the applicative processes of AI in higher education — and yet, our academic policy is somewhat lackluster.
Artificial intelligence tools that are used without explicit permission from a professor are entirely prohibited on the grounds that they are equivalent to “uncredited persons or entities,” as “all work submitted by students will be generated by students themselves.” In a class I took last semester, AI use was acceptable, as long as every input given to and received from the model was cited in the bibliography. This made me think that submitting a transcript of information and citing any quotes or summarized informational pieces gained from AI would mean that its usage would no longer be considered plagiarism. While the AI itself may be trained on questionable means of information gathering, the same can be true of any source online, which is acceptable for students to use as long as it has been correctly cited. A professor is not permitted to decide whether or not plagiarism of academic sources is acceptable or not in their class — plagiarism is never allowed within the honor code. Why, then, is AI usage only considered plagiarism if a professor deems it as such? What if it is thoroughly cited and honestly used?
In my mind, AI is not a great resource. It is often misleading, vague or downright inaccurate. Still, statistics show that it is a resource that many students use, and opening up our academic policy to acknowledge AI would be more helpful than hurtful in an institution dedicated to learning. Encouraging students to refine how they approach resources like AI would allow them to experiment with unfamiliar information streams and learn how to work with them in a hands-on manner. Today, it is uncommon to present a college student with an entirely new kind of academic technology. AI’s recent success and continuous development could be challenging for students to keep up with, and discouraging experimentation with it in higher education buffers that learning even more. Letting students engage with artificial intelligence would also encourage them to construct their own opinions and ideas about it, drawing from personal experience and learning.
Overall, concerns about AI’s impact on academia are legitimate. A large language model is inherently based on the works of others. Whether or not that qualifies as plagiarism is still up to debate — I do not believe that AI models should be allowed to lift information from other works without accrediting the original writers in some way. Still, the technology exists either way and if students want to interact with it, they need to know how to do so. That choice should be open to them, and supported by learned experience. If Mount Holyoke’s mission is truly to provide students with an “intellectually adventurous education,” as it appears on the college’s website, it must allow a truly adventurous exploration into new, unknown technologies, letting students navigate and learn about developments in society that will inevitably impact their lives past graduation.
