The Pierce College Academic Senate adopted a new code of conduct for using artificial intelligence (AI) in the classroom during its meeting on Nov. 4 in the Great Hall.
The new guidelines for professors state that they may choose to allow or disallow AI use within their classes.
Despite the motion to accept the new code passing unanimously, multiple professors, like Distance Education Professor Wendy Bass, expressed concerns with how programs like Turnitin detect AI.
“You should always have a meeting with a student and discuss what may have looked like AI, but it’s not,” Bass said. “Students who know English as a second language are getting tagged, and so we have to be really careful.”
The attending senators held different views on how AI should be used, with professors like Bass who encouraged it in some regard and others who opposed any sort of AI use in academic work.
Physics Department Chair Travis Orloff supported the new guidelines as they allowed professors to have more input in how they operate their classrooms.
“Some faculty love AI and want you to use it in all of their assignments and some faculty hate AI and don’t want it to be used at all,” Orloff said. “So we just want to be aware that different faculty members have different policies when it comes to AI and to be sure that you understand what your particular professor’s policy is.”
In addition to the new rules on AI, the senators chose to pause the implementation of California Assembly Bill 1111, which would call for a standardization of course numbering and naming across all 116 community colleges in California.
Jennifer Moses, a psychology professor at Pierce, pushed for the bill to be paused, not because of the way the bill was written, but because of how it has been implemented.
“They said, now we have to have a common course curriculum, and so now we have to adopt all the same classes all up and down the state, but then they didn’t negotiate any comprehensive transfer agreements,” Moses said. “So now we have this implementation, which is, everybody has to teach the exact same classes now with the exact same content, but they’re still not going to count the same.”
The bill could confuse students who intend to transfer as some classes could be transferable to one school but not another, according to Moses.
The next Academic Senate will be held on Monday, Nov. 25 in Building 600.