Using AI for this section

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WCC has established various levels of permitted student use of artificial intelligence systems. This section is using the Category 3 level of permitted use. The official statement of Category 3 is:
Category 3 – AI Use is Allowed for Specific Assignments and/or Coursework

AI tools may be used only for specific assignments or coursework as designated by the instructor. Your use of AI must support the course learning outcomes and must be properly documented and cited. You are responsible for the accuracy and integrity of any content generated through AI. Note that AI tools may provide incorrect, misleading, or biased information. Instructors reserve the right to request clarification, revisions, or source documentation at any time.

For our section of Math 160 this means that you may use AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, CoPilot, Claude, Gemini, DALL–E) to attempt to get answers to test questions. However,
  1. Just because AI generated an answer does not mean it is right or that you will get credit for it.
  2. Test questions are graded by comparing your answer to the answer on the computer generated answer sheet.
  3. You can use the practice tests and their answer sheets to see if AI is giving you the appropriate answer, i.e., the answers provided by my web pages with the test.
  4. Answers must be submitted on the answer sheet that I provide to you with the test. AI output given as an answer will not be accepted even if answers are somewhere in the AI output.
  5. I can help explain errors that you make in R but I will not even try to explain what caused an AI error or how to fix it. (This is a Basic Statistics course, not one in refining AI prompts.)
  6. Just as a point of reference, students who tried to use AI this past semester were getting test scores in the range of 40 to 55%, i.e., failing.
  7. As appealing as AI is, I remain convinced that it is easier to just use R and the scripts that I provide than it is to try to use AI and then have to refine, and refine, and refine the prompts to achieve the desired answers.
  8. In most of mathematics there is a unique answer to a problem. In statistics we have, in some cases, multiple different answers to a problem. For example, there are three different ways to compute the first and third quartile values of a set of numbers. For any one set of values, each of the three ways may give you different answers. In our section we use the method used by R. If you use AI to find the first and third quartile values of a set of numbers then you may get an answer that is incorrect for the method we use, although it may be correct for a different method. Nonetheless, your AI generated answer will be different from the answer sheet and therefore it is wrong for this section and it will be graded as wrong!
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©Roger M. Palay     Saline, MI 48176     August, 2025