How to Write a Classroom AI Policy
AI guidance is still catching up. Your students already started.
Where AI use and AI guidance actually stand, according to the surveys that counted. Each figure is sourced at the bottom of this page.
of surveyed Canadian teachers in grades 6 to 12 said they have not been given training or tools to identify when students are using AI.
Fraser Institute survey of 756 teachers, 2026of those same teachers said their school has a policy on student AI use. Fewer than half.
Fraser Institute survey of 756 teachers, 2026of surveyed Canadian students aged 18 and over use generative AI for schoolwork, and 48% say their critical thinking has deteriorated since they started.
KPMG in Canada survey of 684 students 18+, October 2025of American teachers report that their school or district has a policy on AI use related to academic integrity.
RAND survey panels, 2025of American students say their teachers never explicitly taught them how to use AI for schoolwork.
RAND survey panels, 2025of American teens say students at their school use AI chatbots to cheat at least sometimes.
Pew Research Center, February 2026Use climbed a lot faster than guidance did, and the gap is where students are standing.
RAND's 2025 survey of nationally representative American panels found 54% of students and 53% of English, math and science teachers had used AI for school. Guidance did not keep pace. In an EdWeek Research Center survey run in October 2025, just 13% of teachers said their district had an AI policy that had been made clear to both students and teachers. In a separate EdWeek Research Center survey run that summer, 45% of teachers, principals and district leaders said their district or school has no AI policy at all.
On the student side, Pew reported in early 2026, from teens surveyed the autumn before, that 54% of American teens say they have used AI chatbots for help with schoolwork, and one in ten say they do all or most of their schoolwork with a chatbot's help.
In Canada the guidance gap is the bigger story. A Fraser Institute survey of 756 teachers, fielded between November 2025 and January 2026, found that most in grades 6 to 12 have been given no training or tools for identifying student AI use, and fewer than half say their school has a policy on student AI use. It is a panel survey rather than a random sample, and the study says so plainly, so read it as a strong signal rather than a count. A KPMG survey found 73% of Canadian students using generative AI for schoolwork, and 48% saying their own critical thinking has deteriorated since they started — but everyone in that sample was 18 or older, and of the students using AI only 15% were in high school, so it is a direction of travel, not a headcount of your Grade 10 class.
Why this lands on your desk
Your board already has an academic honesty policy. Growing Success requires every Ontario board to have one, covering the prevention of cheating and plagiarism, the detection of it, and the consequences for students who do it. What many boards do not have yet is anything specific about AI — and neither document was written for your assignments.
A board policy has to cover every subject in every school. It cannot tell your class whether using AI to check the reasoning in a lab conclusion is help or cheating. That is a judgement about your assignment, your subject, and what you are actually assessing, and nobody above you can make it for you.
There is a fairness problem too. More than 80% of students told RAND that a teacher had never explicitly taught them how to use AI for schoolwork. You cannot fairly hold a student to a rule nobody said out loud. Writing it down, and teaching it once, is the part that makes any consequence defensible three months later.
It protects you as much as it protects them. When a parent calls, "here is the policy in the course outline, we went through it in September, and here is the process I followed" is a very different conversation from one that starts with a hunch and a percentage.
And it matters to the students who are following the rules. In that same Pew survey, 59% of teens said students at their school use AI chatbots to cheat at least sometimes. Students notice. A clear line is for them too.
What a good classroom AI policy contains
Six pieces. If yours has all six, it will hold up in a hallway conversation and in an office meeting.
One clear principle
Everything else hangs off a sentence students can repeat back. In the template below it is: the work you hand in has to come from your own thinking, in your own words. Write yours before you write anything else.
A plain definition
Say what academic dishonesty means in your class, in language a Grade 9 reads without effort, and name AI inside that definition. Vague wording is what gets argued with.
A list of what is allowed
Be specific, and be as generous as your subject allows. Brainstorming, outlining, grammar checks, having a hard idea explained the way a tutor would. Naming the allowed uses is what makes the banned ones enforceable.
A list of what is not
Just as specific. Generated text pasted into an assignment, AI summaries or paraphrases of sources, homework and quizzes done by a chatbot. Students respect a line they can see.
A fair, written process
Decide now what happens the first time you are unsure, and write it down: look at the work, talk privately, then decide. A process students can read is calmer for everyone than a surprise.
Honesty about detection
Say plainly what detection software does and does not do in your class, and that a score never decides anything on its own. Students who know you will talk to them stop being afraid of the machine.
Be straight with students about AI detectors
They are a signal. They are not evidence.
Turnitin says more than 16,000 institutions, publishers and corporations use its services, and it publishes its own documentation on how its AI writing detector behaves. In the first year after that detector launched, Turnitin reported reviewing more than 200 million papers and said about 11% of them were flagged as containing at least 20% AI writing.
Turnitin also says its document-level false positive rate is under 1% for documents with more than 20% AI writing, and it has acknowledged a higher incidence of false positives below that mark. It no longer shows a number at all under 20%: a detection in the 1% to 19% range now gets an asterisk and no percentage. It also raised the minimum length it will score from 150 to 300 words.
Detectors are not evenly wrong, either. A Stanford study published in the journal Patterns tested seven publicly available AI detectors — Turnitin was not one of them — against 91 TOEFL essays written by non-native English speakers and 88 essays written by US Grade 8 students. It scored the Grade 8 essays close to perfectly, and misclassified more than half of the TOEFL essays as AI-generated, an average false positive rate of 61%. In an Ontario classroom that is not an abstract risk. It is a specific kid, in a specific seat, who did the work.
Students already feel this. Half of the American students RAND surveyed said they worry about being falsely accused of using AI to cheat.
The rule that holds up
A detector score can start a conversation. It can never finish one. Treat it as one signal among several, never as sole evidence, and never as the reason you give a student.
The vendors say the same thing. Turnitin describes its AI writing report as a way to start a formative conversation with a student, not a finding of misconduct, and OpenAI said of its own classifier that it "should not be used as a primary decision-making tool."
What actually holds up
- Drafts, notes and version history. Google Docs keeps it, and Word does too when the file lives in OneDrive or SharePoint. A file saved to a laptop or a memory stick has none, so missing history is not evidence of anything — but a student who did the work and has it can show you.
- A short private conversation. Ask them to walk you through their choices and explain their ideas in their own words. In my experience this is the step that settles it, in both directions.
- A baseline. One piece of writing done in front of you in the first weeks, so you know what this student sounds like.
- Checkpoints built into the assignment. Outline due, sources due, draft due. Visible process beats any percentage.
Two things not to do
- Do not paste student work into a public chatbot to "check" whether AI wrote it. That is student work going somewhere you do not control. It is not a shortcut to an answer either: OpenAI withdrew its own AI-text classifier in July 2023 because it was too inaccurate, having caught 26% of AI-written text while wrongly flagging human writing 9% of the time.
- Do not open the meeting with the number. Open it with the work, and let the student talk first.
Write yours in six steps
About an hour, once. You will reuse it every semester.
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Read what already exists
Your school's academic honesty policy, which your board is required to have, plus any AI guidance your board has published and your department's course outline template. Your policy sits underneath those, not beside them. If your board has not published anything about AI yet, say so in your own policy: until there is board guidance on AI, this is the rule in this class.
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Write your one-sentence principle first
Before the lists, before the consequences. If you cannot say it in one sentence, students will not be able to follow it. Everything you decide later gets tested against that sentence.
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Make the two lists specific to your subject
Generic lists get lawyered. Subject-specific ones get followed.
- Science: AI can help you understand what a controlled variable is. It cannot write your conclusion or interpret your data for you.
- English: AI can help you outline an argument. It cannot summarize or paraphrase your sources for you, because that is the thinking being assessed.
- Math: AI can explain a method on a practice question. It cannot produce the solution you hand in.
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Write the process before you need it
Three steps is enough: look at the work, meet the student privately, then decide. Writing it while you are calm is exactly what keeps it fair on the day you are not. Say in the policy that detection software is one input into step one and never the decision.
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Teach it in the first week, then once more
Fifteen minutes. Put a real example side by side: the same task with AI used as a tutor, and with AI used as a ghostwriter, and ask the class which one they could defend. More than 80% of American students told RAND that nobody has ever taught them this. Being the teacher who does is worth more than the wording of the policy.
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Model it, then revisit it
If you use AI in your own work, say so and say how. Plenty of us do, including for the paperwork side of the job. The rule I ask of students is the rule I hold myself to: the thinking stays mine, and I check everything that comes back. If that side of the job is what brought you here, our guide to Ontario report card comments covers it properly. Then put a note in your calendar for the semester break, because a policy written in September usually needs a line added by February.
Copy it, then make it yours
A complete classroom AI policy in student-facing language.
Academic Integrity Policy
Our commitment: honesty
In this course, honesty matters. Your work has to be your own, so that your marks actually reflect what you did and what you learned. That means taking responsibility for your work, giving credit to anyone who helped you, and citing your sources properly, in APA style.
What academic dishonesty is
Academic dishonesty means handing in someone else's work as if it were yours. It includes:
- plagiarism (copying and pasting without citing),
- cheating on a test or an exam,
- working with someone else on something that was assigned as individual work, or
- using artificial intelligence (AI) to do the work for you.
Using artificial intelligence (AI)
What is allowed: AI as a tool
You can use AI to help you:
- find ideas or build an outline,
- check your grammar and improve your writing style,
- understand a difficult topic, the way you would with a tutor,
- format your citations (always check them, because AI gets citations wrong).
What is not allowed: academic dishonesty
You cannot use AI to:
- write text that you copy and paste into an assignment,
- summarize or paraphrase your sources for you,
- do your homework, your quizzes or your tests.
The basic principle: the work you hand in has to come from your own thinking, in your own words.
What happens if I have a question about your work
If I have a question about whether the work you handed in is your own, I will follow a fair and private three-step process.
1. I look first
Before I talk to you, I look carefully at your work, at the sources you may have used, and at anything else I have, including reports from detection software. Detection software is only one signal, and it is never enough on its own. It can be wrong, so it never decides anything by itself. This step is about understanding the situation before we talk about it.
2. We talk, privately
Then I set up a time to meet with you. The goal is a conversation, not an accusation. I will ask you to walk me through how you did the work, to show me your notes or drafts, and to explain your ideas in your own words. This is the part that matters most, and it is the part that is fairest to you.
3. A fair decision
After we talk, I make a decision based on everything I know.
- If there is no sign of dishonesty, the matter is closed.
- If dishonesty is confirmed, the consequence depends on how serious it was, on how many times it has happened, and on your own circumstances. It may mean redoing the work, so that you actually learn what the assignment was for. In a serious case, or if it keeps happening, it can mean a mark of zero and a report to administration.
- Free to copy and adapt
- No sign-up
- Student-facing language
- From a real Ontario course
Adapted from the AI policy in a real Ontario Grade 9 science (SNC1W) syllabus, the course taught by Gradefully's founder. Free to copy, translate and adapt. No credit needed.
Line it up with your school and board first
This is a teacher's template, not legal advice and not board policy. Your school's academic honesty policy, your board's AI guidance and your own professional obligations all come first, and where anything here conflicts with them, theirs wins. It is worth showing your department head too. A department that says the same thing is far easier on students than six teachers saying six different things.
Five things to change before you use it
- Add "ask me first." The single most useful line you can add is that a student who is not sure whether something is allowed should ask you before doing it, and that asking is always safe.
- Change the citation style. It says APA because that is what that course uses.
- Change the consequences. Mark penalties, reporting and escalation are usually set above your classroom, so match what your school actually does. Growing Success asks boards to build consequences as a continuum weighed against four things: the student's grade level, their maturity, how many times it has happened, and their individual circumstances. A zero is not a ministry default.
- Change the examples to your subject. Use the lists in step 3 above as a starting point.
- Change the voice to yours. Students can tell instantly when a policy was pasted in and never read aloud.
Classroom AI policy FAQ
Do I need a classroom AI policy if my board already has one?
Yes, because they do different jobs. Growing Success requires every Ontario board to have a policy covering the prevention and detection of cheating and plagiarism and the consequences for it, and that policy sets the boundaries for everyone. A classroom policy tells students what counts as their own work in your assignments, which is a subject-level decision only you can make. Your classroom policy should sit under your board's and never contradict it.
Should I just ban AI completely?
You can, and in some courses that is the right call. Make the ban specific and enforceable, and say what students should do instead. A blanket ban everyone knows is unenforceable teaches students that your rules are decoration. Most teachers get further by naming a few allowed uses, because that is what makes the banned uses clear.
Can I use an AI detector score as proof that a student cheated?
No. Treat it as one signal among several and never as sole evidence. Turnitin no longer shows a number at all below its 20% threshold, and a Stanford study published in the journal Patterns found that seven publicly available detectors misclassified more than half of a set of TOEFL essays by non-native English writers as AI-generated. A score is a reason to look more closely and to have a conversation. Drafts, notes, version history and a student explaining their thinking are what actually hold up.
What should I do the first time I suspect a student used AI?
Slow down and follow your process. Look at the work and the possible sources first, then meet the student privately and ask them to walk you through how they did it and explain their ideas in their own words. Decide after that conversation, not before it. In my experience that meeting settles most of what a percentage cannot, in both directions.
Can I copy this template into my course outline?
Yes. It is free to copy, translate and adapt, and you do not need to credit anyone or ask permission. Please read it against your school and board policies first, and change anything that does not match how your class actually runs.
Where the claims on this page come from
The documents behind the claims on this page. Page numbers are the printed page.
- Growing Success: Assessment, Evaluation and Reporting in Ontario Schools, First Edition, Covering Grades 1 to 12
- The Ontario Curriculum, De-streamed Course: Science — Grade 9 (SNC1W)
- GPT detectors are biased against non-native English writers
- Fabrication and errors in the bibliographic citations generated by ChatGPT
- AI Use in Schools Is Quickly Increasing but Guidance Lags Behind: Findings from the RAND Survey Panels
- How Teens Use and View AI
- Survey of Canadian Grades 6–12 Teachers on AI Training and School Policies for Its Use
- Generative AI boom among Canadian students raises dilemmas
- Students Will Take the Lead on Crafting a Model AI Policy for Schools
- How This District Got Students, Teachers, Parents, and Leaders to Agree on AI
- Turnitin's AI writing detection capabilities FAQs
- Turnitin marks one year anniversary of its AI writing detector with millions of papers reviewed globally
- Turnitin admits there are some cases of higher false positives in AI writing detection tool
- New AI classifier for indicating AI-written text
- View previous versions of Office files
The Fraser Institute study is a non-probability panel survey, and the Turnitin figures are the vendor's own. Links checked July 2026. If a source here does not say what we say it says, tell us at /contact/ and we will fix it.
Report cards next? Gradefully drafts the comments in your own voice.
The gradebook this template's author built: your marks, your class lists, and the report card comments in one app.