Academic misconduct

The Academic misconduct policy and procedure explains what the University considers as academic misconduct, how suspected misconduct will be investigated and what penalties may be applied where an offence is found to have occurred.

Read the policy and procedures

In addition the Philosophy Department has issued a statement to students regarding our position on the use of Generative AI on Philosophy modules:

Generative AI use on Philosophy modules 

The Department is keen for there to be as much clarity as possible for students on the rules about the use of generative AI (eg Chat GPT). Our position here is very simple: we don’t think that there are good reasons to use generative AI on Philosophy modules, and we think there are good reasons to not use it. So we are prohibiting its use, so as to help you get the most out of your degree. 

If you simply want a clear, take home message it is that you should not use generative AI on Philosophy modules, either when you are already working on your assessments, or at the pre-assessment stage of your work, e.g. when you are brainstorming ideas or making lecture notes. 

But if you are interested in the pedagogical rationale for our policy, you may like to read the AI Appendix of our UG and PG Assessment Guides.

The University is running an AI Pilot in which five different colour-coded levels of acceptable generative AI use are outlined. As a Department we have gone for the most restrictive of the five levels, pink, for all our modules. This is described as follows: 

“Gen AI must not be used. 

Your assignment should be produced using information sourced by you from your learning materials and academic sources and cited appropriately. 

You are still permitted to use GenAI tools embedded within software for structure suggestions, checking spelling, grammar and references, but Gen AI cannot be used to translate work.” 

Here, we hasten to add that ‘structure’ should be understood to relate to sentence structure (grammatical structure) and formatting structure (e.g. titles, sub-titles and text-alignment) only. It does not include organization of philosophical material. Being able to organize your philosophical ideas is a core philosophical skill, and should not be outsourced to generative AI. 

We hope that the simplicity of our policy on this potentially confusing topic is helpful to you. If you have any questions about our policy, feel free to drop me (d.morgan@york.ac.uk) an email, or, if you prefer, raise the issue with your academic supervisor or with one of your module leaders (e.g. in the first lecture of the new semester).