Attention PHHS Students and Parents.
After reviewing the use of generative AI tools in Term 1 assessment submissions, the school is adding an addendum to our school assessment policy. This addendum is active policy from Monday 22 May, 2023. The addendum will be inserted into each year group's Assessment Schedule and will be available in full on our website and on the Year Adviser Canvas page.
Additionally, each subject will be reviewing the remaining tasks to be completed in 2023. It is likely that adjustments will need to be made to our assessment schedule. These changes will be communicated to students in a timely manner.
Please read the addendum below carefully.
Assessment Policy Addendum
Use and detection of generative artificial intelligence (AI)
It is important that the school and students take every measure to maintain the integrity of assessment tasks and to ensure that assessment task results are both valid and reliable. These measures include taking all available measures to ensure that students abide by the principles underlying "All My Own Work".
In January 2023, the NSW Department of Education has publicly announced that the use of generative AI programs (one example is ChatGPT) are banned in NSW public schools.
The emergence of generative AI programs has proven a challenge to ensuring the integrity of all assessment tasks. Therefore, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) programs to either generate, write, modify, improve, edit or review student submissions is prohibited.
At Port Hacking High School, most pre-prepared submissions are uploaded to Canvas. Once submissions are uploaded, a third-party software program, Turnitin, reviews all submissions and generates plagiarism and AI reports. Turnitin is a highly reputable plagiarism and AI detection software program. Turnitin will capture the use of AI for any reason.
Students should not use AI in ANY capacity when creating and reviewing their work. This includes using AI to:
- generate all or part of an assessment task;
- improve the standard of their work;
- review or edit work for spelling, punctuation, sentence structure or general language use or;
- run their work through an AI detection tool.
Additionally, students must assure that they adhere to all assessment task requirements which may include:
- specifying the software program/s allowed to be used to create the student's work eg for text based tasks only Microsoft Word and/or Google Docs can be used. (Both these programs are provided free to NSW Department of Education students.) This means, that this software is the only software that can be used in the creation of a student's work and only the embedded tools in these software programs are to be used.
- ensure that "track changes" is turned on from the time a student begins to create their task.
- ensure that at no time do they use or does their work come into contact with any software programs apart from those allowed by the assessment notification.
A full copy of each year’s assessment policy can be found on the school’s website:
If you have any further questions please contact your child's Deputy Principal by 22 May 2023.
