Rules and Guidelines for Education

Rules set by the Examining Boards

Unless students have explicit permission from the examiner as written in the course guide, using AI to generate the content of an assignment is considered fraud (Article 16, paragraph 3 of the 2023-2024 Rules & Regulations). Examiners can request an additional oral verification of the assignment in case of doubt. Suspicions of AI fraud will be investigated by the Examining Boards in a similar way as they investigate plagiarism. Besides prohibiting this specific usage of AI tools, the Examining Boards stress a few important points:

  • Students may use AI only to support essential academic skills like critical reflection, literature research, and scientific writing, not to replace those skills.
  • Students are always held accountable for the correctness, completeness, and coherence of their (written) assignments.
  • When using AI in an assignment, students should acknowledge this usage and reflect on how it impacts the assignment. See “How to document your GenAI use?” for more information on how to cite AI tools in (academic) texts.

If you have questions about these rules, or require assistance in the use of AI in your course, contact us at [email protected].

Detection of AI use

Within Wageningen University we have access to the AI-detection tool developed by Turnitin. When uploading a document in Turnitin, after the plagiarism check has been finalized, in addition an AI score becomes visible (upon inspecting the document). Clicking on the score shows the full output of the AI-detection tool. This tool uses the same technology as is employed by LLMs to generate texts, only in reverse. The tool uses statistics to determine the chance that certain words occur in a text, and in a specific pattern. Based on this information the tool indicates with a score how much of the document it determines to be potentially written by an AI-tool. This detector has several specific limitations, however:

  1. It does not look at the correctness of the references. This still needs to be checked through conventional means.
  2. The tool does not function for Dutch texts, only English.
  3. The texts should be longer than 300 words and shorter than 30000 words. Headers, captions, and references are excluded from this word count.

The use of the Turnitin AI detection software should never be a first step for a teacher. Instead, it may only serve as a potential confirmation of ones own suspicion. It is upon the Examining Board to determine whether fraud has been committed through the use of AI. The report generated by the Turninin AI detection software is not valid as evidence of potential AI misuse.

As LLMs are being trained to resemble human-written texts more and more, the accuracy of these detection tools becomes more difficult to trust. Hence we recommend not to rely on these tools.

Never use other online AI detection services, as this would be a violation of privacy and data security regulations.