As AI grows in adoption and sophistication, conflicts between faculty and students around mismatched expectations of AI use become more widespread. The Graduate School has issued guidelines and strongly encourages programs to use them to clarify their expectations on this topic.
Graduate Programs
The Graduate School strongly encourages all graduate programs to establish guidelines and expectations around AI use at key milestones (for example, qualifying and comprehensive exams, dissertation proposals, and dissertations).
Resources
A working group has developed a guide to assist programs with developing these policies. The guide does not prescribe a single policy. Instead, it walks a program through defining its own learning outcomes and boundaries, then illustrates 3 models along a spectrum, from strict limits on AI use to full integration, applied to each milestone.
View this program-level guide here.
Advising
The Graduate School also encourages individual faculty to develop their own AI use expectations for the students and teams they advise directly, consistent with whatever their department or program has established.
Examples
Below are two examples already in use at MSU, both aimed at the faculty level rather than the program level:
- the College of Natural Science's AI Use Compact
- a short fill-in template a faculty advisor completes with an individual student
- the College of Social Science's Framework for Developing Guidelines for Student Use of AI in Research
- a 9-step process for a faculty research mentor to work through with their own team.
Timeline
These policies should be established by the end of the 2026-2027 academic year.
For questions or concerns regarding this mandate, please contact Eric Torng at torng@msu.edu.