A Guided Inquiry Approach to Students Co-Designing Generative AI Course Policies

TEXT START: As generative AI (GenAI) use among students increases, educators face growing questions about how to support learning while addressing ethical and institutional concerns.

The Dissection

This paper turns a structural substitution shock into a classroom deliberation exercise. It examines how students negotiate rules for AI use—training, disclosure, institutional support, and participation—while leaving ownership, capability concentration, and the fate of human cognitive labor outside the frame. It improves local sensemaking. It does not govern the machinery causing the displacement.

The Core Fallacy

The category error is treating better policy design as a potential solution to an automation problem. Training, disclosure procedures, and stakeholder participation may manage conduct inside a course; they cannot restore the wage-to-consumption circuit once AI achieves durable cost and performance superiority across cognitive work. At best, these policies are lag defenses. The paper’s actual claim is narrower and pedagogical, but mistaking its mechanism for systemic resistance would be analytically false.

Hidden Assumptions

• Human-produced cognitive work will remain economically necessary enough for course rules to matter beyond assessment.
• AI use can be reliably disclosed and authenticated through standardized procedures.
• Institutions possess the authority and resources to enforce coherent policies at scale.
• Stakeholder deliberation produces durable governance rather than temporary compliance.
• Training makes students more autonomous, rather than more efficient servitors of AI capital.
• Student involvement constitutes real power instead of consultative theater.
• GenAI is a bounded classroom-use issue rather than part of a general labor-substitution shock.
• Institutional adaptation can be mistaken for reversal of the underlying trajectory.

Social Function

Primary classification: transition management. Secondary classifications: ideological anesthetic, prestige signaling, and partial truth.

The activity gives institutions a legitimate process for absorbing conflict, distributing responsibility, and manufacturing buy-in around rules they cannot fully enforce. It is not pure copium: clearer disclosure standards, training, and support can reduce arbitrary punishment and improve short-term educational integrity. But this is hospice care for a human-centered instructional order, not a cure. The exercise makes the transition more legible while leaving the source of power untouched.

The Verdict

A useful local diagnostic and a strategically inadequate response. The study maps how students try to make an eroding institution governable after leverage has begun migrating to AI owners. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, co-designed course policies preserve fragments of educational procedure; they do not preserve productive human participation, prevent cognitive automation, or stop system death.