2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Feedback from employers of the author’s home institution indicate that graduates need to begin their careers familiarized with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools so that they can apply them to their work. To do that, educators must raise the floor on how they use GenAI in their pedagogy, in both the major courses as well as general education. It is a difficult demand of instructors because of the very fast developmental pace of GenAI and large-learning models (LLMs), and the race by these developers to win the market with their specific tool. This author thus felt it imperative to introduce GenAI as soon as possible into their primary course offering, and potentially accelerate their learning curve as steeply as GenAI is developing. This study focuses on the qualitative student experiences with and responses to implementing a GenAI requirement in an engineering-focused liberal education course with a large enrollment of over 300 students. Two of the five essay assignments in the course were altered to introduce a basic approach to utilizing GenAI specifically as a learning tool, as well as to introduce students to critical analysis of another writer’s work. The altered essay assignments address a specific prompt designed to connect directly to the course’s Learning Outcomes, so the expectation is that it contributes to students meeting those Outcomes. The requirement for students is to (1) write their own essay response to the assignment’s prompt, (2) develop their own prompt to ask one or more GenAI chatbots to write an essay about, (3) examine the GenAI-written essay in comparison to their essay, and (4) critique the GenAI essay to discuss quality and accuracy of information. This paper will present anonymized student critiques in a qualitative way, and draw conclusions as to the effectiveness of this basic approach to introducing GenAI into student assessments.