AI tools & academic integrity
You may use AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini or Claude, as long as you remain the author of your work. AI can help you write and debug code and phrase your ideas more clearly. It can't think critically about your question, so designing experiments and judging clinical relevance stay with you.
You are also the final reviewer of everything AI produces for you. Check that generated text, code and citations are accurate, and correct any shifts in terminology or style it introduces. Your analysis and writing must reflect your own understanding, and you must be able to defend every figure, result and statement in your project.
Good use
We encourage uses like these:
- Using ChatGPT to rephrase unclear sentences in your report, without changing what they say.
- Asking Copilot for boilerplate code or plotting functions, which you then review and adapt.
- Using an LLM to summarize papers that you then read and verify yourself.
- Asking an AI assistant to suggest alternative statistical tests or modeling ideas, and checking them yourself.
- Asking AI for help with presentation, such as a diagram, a figure layout or a README template.
Lazy or uncritical use
These uses show a lack of effort or understanding:
- Prompting "Write a report on fetal heart rate variability for me." You won't understand the result, and you can't verify it.
- Submitting fluent AI-generated paragraphs that contain factual or logical errors, which shows you didn't understand them.
- Using AI-generated figures, pseudocode or equations that you can't explain or defend.
- Letting AI decide your project's direction or how to interpret your results.
- Filling your report with verbose text that reads well but says nothing. It automatically scores low on depth.
Naive AI use is easy to recognize: polished phrasing, generic structure and no depth. We treat such work as minimal effort.
Disclosing AI use
We don't judge you for using AI. Much of this website's content was generated with AI help.
There are no universally agreed academic guidelines on using or disclosing AI tools, so for the sake of scientific transparency we follow a simple convention. You don't need to log every prompt, but if you used AI in a meaningful way, say so briefly in your report or README. For example:
- "ChatGPT was used to improve clarity of phrasing and generate code comments."
- "GitHub Copilot was used for code scaffolding; all logic and analysis were developed by the authors."
- "Claude was used to help draft the project abstract, which was then rewritten and verified by the team."
How AI use affects your grade
Good AI use can make your work clearer and save you time, which indirectly helps your score under the grading criteria Poster, video & discussion and Independence, initiative & professionalism. Lazy or uncritical use lowers your score under Results, analysis & reflection and Independence, initiative & professionalism.
AI and plagiarism
AI output can contain copyrighted or unattributed material without your knowing it, and you are responsible for checking that whatever you use is original. Plagiarized or unverifiable AI content is treated as plagiarism under the plagiarism and citation policy. AI content that misrepresents your understanding counts as academic misconduct.