Teaching Policy for Student Use of AI in the Writing Assignments of a Design Course

Michael Alley
​23 December 2025*
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Assumptions

Any teaching policy for how students should use AI to help write in a course requires examination of the course goals. For the teaching policy described here, the course is engineering design, and the main course goal is for students to learn the engineering design process. Two secondary goals that relate to writing are that students--
  1. gain experience on the process of engineering writing
  2. produce professional documents
Put another way, this course emphasizes both the writing process and writing product.

In this course, an important assumption is that students already have gained experience from their general writing courses on the different stages of the writing process: 
  1. researching and planning
  2. drafting
  3. revising
  4. proofreading
Another important assumption is that before they graduate, engineering students should gain experience using AI to assist in the writing of a professional document.
Policy for Using AI to Write Course Documents

Overall, students are to use traditional means to draft course documents. However, students are allowed to use AI tools to assist in the researching, revising, and proofreading of those documents. Given below is an explanation of this policy.

Drafting Documents. Students should draft their design documents because the main goal of the course is that students learn the design process and during the draft process, authors
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​References
  1. Michael Alley, The Craft of Scientific Writing, 4th ed. (New York: Springer, 2018).​​
  2. Michael Alley, "Section 1: Grammar," Writing as an Engineer or Scientist (1997).​
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* Except for the AI example in Figure 1, AI was not used to draft or revise this webpage.