Last week, the University of Chicago Law School released a memo detailing how the school intends to transform its pedagogy in connection with the explosion of generative artificial intelligence. In the memo, the school suggests sweeping policy overhauls, which will ban electronics from first-year classrooms (with some caveats), and administer all first-year exams in-person, while suggesting that upper-level elective courses do the same. The document represents a serious attempt to grapple with issues that have rocked the education world since the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022.
It’s clear that Princeton is feeling the effects of AI use, too. Earlier this year, the faculty voted to require all in-person exams to be proctored — due in-part to the proliferation of the use of AI in the classroom. For Princeton to stand by the values of a liberal education — deep, critical thinking and humanistic inquiry — it will need to take after UChicago’s law school and develop a more cohesive, institutional stance on the use of AI.
Princeton’s task, in this case, is a lot tougher than that of a law school. The sheer breadth of the institution’s academic offerings means that the development of an institution-wide policy on AI will be difficult. But the status quo is not sustainable. Between seniors who graduated in the spring of 2022 — before ChatGPT was released to the public — and seniors who graduated in 2025, there was a 50 percent jump in the share of students who admitted to cheating on an assignment or exam. Moreover, 28 percent of the Class of 2025 admitted to using AI on “an assignment when it was not allowed.”
I also believe that these statistics represent a vast underreporting of the amount of unauthorized AI use at Princeton. Strolling through Firestone during finals, many of the open laptops I saw had Claude or Gemini open on the screens. Students have integrated the use of generative AI into every single facet of their academic work — to assist the reading and digesting of complex texts or to provide a helping hand on a problem set.
At its most sinister, AI allows the user to bypass thinking entirely. In one of my humanities precepts last year, the student next to me typed a professor’s question into ChatGPT and read the answer off of their screen verbatim, passing it off as their own thought. Seeing this made me sad — for myself, of course, who had to sit through the less-than-insightful comment. But it also made me sad for the student who asked it, who probably felt like he had nothing of value to contribute to the discussion — and therefore turned to our tech overlords for something — anything — to say. And it is this type of AI use that is antithetical to the type of thinking that prepares students at Princeton and beyond for issues in the real world — issues that require humanity to address effectively.
Princeton’s current institutional position on teaching and AI from the Office of the Dean of the College requires course instructors to set “clear expectations” on AI use and state them in the course’s syllabus. Of course, it is against the Honor Code for a student to pass off work generated by AI as their own, but the University has largely left AI policy up to individual instructors and departments. Although the current policy may seem to give professors more control over their classes, it is clear that it has failed. The University needs a cohesive policy so students know what to expect and are not defaulting to excessive AI usage.
In the vein of UChicago’s law school, Princeton should absolutely ban electronics in the classroom across all of its first-year academic programming — including freshman seminars and writing seminars — barring certain exemptions for accessibility and course topicality. That way, students will get a proper introduction during their first year into being active learners in their seminars, preventing them from hiding behind the screens of their laptops and using AI to answer the questions that their human professors ask them.
A policy like this need not be exclusive to one’s first year: It should be the default for all lectures and seminars, making it so that laptops and other electronics must be explicitly allowed — instead of prohibited — by a course instructor. While some classes may benefit from the use of technology, I would assert that most do not. Not only do handwritten notes lead to higher grades, but a policy like this would take pressure off of professors whose students take laptop use as the default expectation.
Beyond the seminar, UChicago’s law school attempts to address areas of vulnerability in the world of writing. While this area of the policy is less concrete, it still creates an expectation that AI should not be used to primarily produce research or write work while emphasizing AI literacy and oral discussion through a class presentation or a one-on-one with a professor. In-person discussion, the report contends, provides a test of knowledge without the guardrail of technology.
This area of the policy recognizes that AI undermines the foundations of argumentative writing and research, while also understanding that students will potentially be called upon to use AI at some point in their professional careers. Princeton should offer a similar institutional approach: AI skills will be necessary for many of us, but the tool is most useful with an understanding of how to use it responsibly and with an ability to take a skeptical lens to the content that it outputs. And, where capacity allows, instructors should push students to defend their ideas out loud, through presentations or discussions.
As Princeton winds up for another semester, professors crafting their syllabi and administrators thinking about the next undergraduate announcement should keep in mind that a patchwork policy on AI isn’t going to be effective. If we, as students, want to be prepared for the real world, we’re going to have to do some real thinking — AI is not a good substitute.
Charlie Yale is a rising junior in the history department from Omaha, Neb. You can reach him at yale[at]dailyprincetonian.com or @charliemyale on X.