Field Guide Entry — How to make your class AI-free

Deciding Where You Stand

How to make your class AI-free

If you’ve decided to keep AI out of course, it takes more than just banning AI use. This entry will help you be intentional about your course decisions.

The concept

Your academic freedom means that you shouldn’t be forced to restructure your pedagogy just because a new technology has appeared. It’s also important to realize that students don’t exist in a vacuum. With this entry, we’ll use AI to help you think more about what your course is developing and how AI assistance might work against what you’re trying to do with your class.

This entry is specifically for bridging the gap between not wanting AI in your class and actually making this conviction work in your class. This will require lots of decisions that are easy to underestimate: how you explain your reasoning, whether your assignments actually hold up to what you’re asking of students, and what you say when a student pushes back. Ignoring AI isn’t the same as opting out of it thoughtfully.

What opting out means and what it doesn’t

Yours to decide — no extra work required

Whether you use AI in your own teaching and preparation

Whether you require students to engage with AI tools

Whether AI use is permitted, restricted, or prohibited in your course

Whether this is revisited next semester

Possible — but requires active work

A no-AI policy students understand and can reason about, not just comply with

Assignments that develop something worth protecting from AI short cutting

A prepared answer for students who ask why (especially the ones who ask seriously)

Knowing what AI actually produces on your assignments, so your policy is grounded

Not available — regardless of policy

Ensuring students don’t encounter AI outside your course

Guaranteeing no student uses AI on your work and submits it anyway

Avoiding the question indefinitely — students will bring it up

Four questions to consider when designing an AI-free course

These aren’t gotchas. They’re the questions students are quietly asking — and that you’ll be in a stronger position for having answered in advance.

What specifically does this course develop that AI would short circuit?

You might believe that AI use is damaging to a students’ education, but if you can’t answer this clearly and precisely for students, creating an AI-free course will be an uphill battle.

Why does doing this work without AI produce something genuinely different?

Struggle is not self-evidently valuable. The question is whether the difficulty of doing this without AI is the kind of difficulty that produces learning, or the kind that just produces friction. If you can articulate what happens cognitively when students do the work themselves, you have your answer.

What will you say when a student asks: “But I’ll need to use AI in my career. Why are we pretending it doesn’t exist?”

Even if you don’t want to use AI, this is a legitimate question that deserves a thoughtful answer. You should be prepared to explain to a student what they’re gaining now without AI and how that will apply to their future development.

If a student used AI on your assignments anyway, would they miss anything essential?

This is the hardest question and the most important one. What if AI produced a product that passed your rubric? Is your assignment actually measuring what you think it is?

AI prompt — optional, and worth the irony

Yes, this is an AI prompt in an entry for faculty who don’t want to use AI. You don’t have to use it. But running your own assignments through AI before deciding your policy is intelligence-gathering, not endorsement — and it’s more useful than guessing what students are seeing.

Prompt 1 — test your assignments

Act as a student enrolled in [course name]. Here is an assignment from that course: [paste assignment description]. Complete it to the best of your ability. Do not add caveats about what you can or can’t do — just produce the best response a student might submit. [Run this yourself. Then ask: Is this response something a student could submit? What’s missing? What would a faculty member reading it notice?]

Prompt 2 — draft your explanation to students

I’m a professor of [field] who has decided not to permit AI use in my course. I want to write a brief explanation for students — not a policy statement, but a genuine account of why doing this work without AI is important in this field. It should acknowledge that AI exists, explain what students gain by doing the work themselves, and be honest about the tradeoffs. Draft 3–4 sentences I could include in my syllabus or say in class.

What to actually say to students

A policy statement tells students what they can’t do. An explanation tells them why. Students can follow a rule without understanding it; they can only respect a position they’ve heard reasoning for. The difference matters most when they’re tired, behind, and tempted.

The explanation doesn’t need to be long. It needs to be honest and specific enough to earn the benefit of the doubt. Here’s what that looks like compared to what most syllabus language actually says:

What most syllabi say

“Use of AI tools including ChatGPT is not permitted in this course. Violations will be treated as academic dishonesty.”

This tells students the rule. It doesn’t tell them anything about why.

What a reasoned position sounds like

“This course doesn’t use AI tools, and I want to explain why rather than just tell you. The work we do here — [specific to course] — requires building [specific skill or capacity]. That development happens through the difficulty of doing the work yourself, not through reviewing someone else’s output. I’m not pretending AI doesn’t exist; I’m asking you to develop something that will make you better at using it later. If you have questions about a specific situation, ask me.”

This tells students the reasoning. They can disagree with it — but they can also respect it, which is what you actually want.

Caveats

A no-AI policy doesn’t make detection easier. Academic integrity processes are time-consuming, often inconclusive, and emotionally costly for everyone involved. The strongest deterrent is usually a combination of clear reasoning, relationships with students, and assignment design — not detection alone.
Your position may need to evolve. An AI policy that made sense in 2023 may not describe the same situation in 2026. It’s worth revisiting at least once per academic year, not because you have to change it, but because revisiting it keeps the reasoning current.
This entry is not a template for avoiding engagement with AI entirely. Even faculty who don’t use AI in their courses benefit from understanding what AI produces on their assignments.

Reflection questions

Can you explain your no-AI position to a skeptical student in two minutes — not reciting your syllabus policy, but giving the actual reasoning?
Is your position grounded in what this course specifically develops, or in a more general resistance to AI?
What would it take for you to update this position? Knowing the answer to that question is useful regardless of whether anything changes.

1.1-How to make your class AI-free