Classroom Policies

Attendance: All students are expected to do the weekly readings and participate actively in the conference conversation. Consistent attendance is necessary for a dynamic conference. Attendance will be taken during every meeting. Any tardiness beyond ten minutes will be considered an absence. Students who miss more than three (3) conferences will fail this course, unless special circumstances (specifically COVID quarantine) prevent your attendance. 

COVID requirements: When your health allows, you are expected to be present and engaged in class. At the same time, each community member has an individual responsibility to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Following public health guidance is part of living in an honorable community. 

  •       If you test positive for COVID, you should not attend class for five days. Please contact the HCC. You can find more information on Reed’s COVID policies here.
  •       The CDC suggests that people with the following symptoms may have COVID: fever or chills, cough, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, fatigue, muscle or body aches, headache, new loss of taste or smell, sore throat, congestion or runny nose, nausea or vomiting, diarrhea. As always, please consult a medical professional (members of the HCC or otherwise) if you have any questions about your health or health safety. 

If you need to miss a class, or series of classes, due to COVID, you are responsible for emailing me to let me know as soon as possible. You are also responsible for coordinating with me to complete work that you might miss due to absences. I will provide makeup options in cases involving COVID.

If you were potentially exposed to COVID and have no symptoms, please come to class; however, you are required to wear a mask at all times in class. If you have a medical issue that will make this challenging for you, please see me and/or Disability and Accessibility Resources to discuss accommodations.

Extensions: I do not give extensions. I will accept late papers but will mark them down. I will deduct points each day an assignment is turned in after the deadline. For example, a paper that would have scored a B+ will receive a B if turned in one day late, or B- if turned in two days late, and so on. Please note: students must complete all classroom assignments to pass the class.

Special accommodations: Accomodations will be given to students who have conditions that affect their performances in class. Please provide documentation for these concerns and be sure to speak to the instructors within the first two weeks of class. For questions on these accommodations and official processes of getting tested, please contact Disability Services: disability-service@reed.edu or 503.517.7921. If there are extenuating circumstances, please do not hesitate to talk with us.

Plagiarism: Plagiarism will result in immediate failure of the course. Proper citations must be used when you quote from another’s work, but also when your writing is built upon others' preexisting ideas or writing. When in doubt, you should cite the material. The following resources speak to the importance and severity of the matter and provide guidelines for how to cite properly in the Chicago format:

Generative AI: Artificial intelligence (AI) cannot be used in this class. Use of AI sources will result in immediate failure of the course.

All work submitted as your own must truly be your own. Using ChatGPT or other AI tools to write your papers, exams, or discussion comments constitutes academic misconduct (read about what constitutes academic misconduct here).

While AI has many potential uses for academic work, it is not an appropriate tool to use for this course. The purpose of the assignments in this course is to help you to develop your critical reading skills; and to prepare you to do the type of original research and analysis that is required for the Senior Thesis. AI tools like ChatGPT make it easy to avoid challenging and therefore improving your critical thinking, reading, and writing skills. AI tools like ChatGPT make it easy to avoid developing your analytical thinking, creativity, and voice. The writing assignments and our discussions in conference are meant to help you develop your critical thinking and writing skills, and to help you learn how to articulate complicated ideas at the college level.

Artificial intelligence (AI) language models, such as ChatGPT, and online assignment help tools, such as Chegg®, are examples of online learning support platforms: they cannot be used for course assignments except as explicitly authorized by the instructor. The following actions are prohibited in this course:

  • Submitting all or any part of an assignment to an online learning support platform; 
  • Incorporating any part of an AI generated response in an assignment; 
  • Using AI to brainstorm, formulate arguments, discussion questions, or template ideas for assignments (e.g. using it formulate or draft a thesis statement or create a paper outline);
  • Using AI to summarize or contextualize source materials;
  • Using AI to rewrite your paper to "fix" its style, content, organization, etc.;
  • Submitting your own work for this class to an online learning support platform for iteration or improvement.

You are free to use spell check, grammar check, translation software, and synonym identification tools (e.g., Grammarly, and MS Word).

If you are in doubt as to whether you are using an online learning support platform appropriately in this course, I encourage you to talk with me.

Any assignment content composed by any resource other than you, regardless of whether that resource is human or digital, must be attributed to the source through proper citation. (For citation guidance, see above link to the Chicago Manual of Style.)

Unattributed use of online learning support platforms and unauthorized sharing of instructional property are forms of scholastic dishonesty and will be treated as such.

If you submit work that appears to have been written using AI sources, the process will be the same as cases involving academic responsibility and misconduct. Again, use of AI sources will result in immediate failure of the course.

Limitation of AI Tools
Work created by AI tools may not be considered original work and instead, considered automated plagiarism. It is derived from previously created texts from other sources that the models were trained on, yet doesn't cite sources. If you use its plagiarized work, you are liable for its plagiarism of other sources, as well as your plagiarism of ChatGPT itself.

AI tools have limitations (i.e., they lack critical thinking to evaluate and reflect on criteria; they lack abductive reasoning to make judgments with incomplete information at hand, and thus they are often wrong).

AI is vulnerable to discrimination because it can inadvertently (or intentionally) perpetuate existing biases present in the data it is trained on. For example, if an AI system is trained on data that contains a bias against a certain group of people, the system may make decisions that are unfair or discriminatory towards that group. There are several reasons why AI systems can perpetuate discrimination:

  • Bias in the training data: If the training data contains biases, the AI system may learn and replicate those biases in its decision-making.
  • Lack of diversity in the training data: If the training data does not include a diverse range of examples, the AI system may not perform well on diverse inputs, which may lead to discrimination.
  • Lack of transparency: Some AI systems can be difficult to understand and interpret, making it challenging to detect and correct for biases.
  • Lack of accountability: Without proper oversight and accountability, it can be difficult to identify and address discrimination in AI systems.

It is important to keep in mind that these biases can be unconscious, unintended and hard to detect, but they can have serious consequences if they are not addressed.