A HARVEST KERNEL WORKING SESSION . SEEDSTACKING
The Instructor Disclosure Line
MIT’s AI committee asks every subject to post a generative AI policy in the syllabus. Section 3.2.3 asks instructors to disclose their own AI use in slides, feedback and grading. Most faculty have written the first line. Almost nobody has written the second one.
This is the manual method. Six boxes, one assignment you are actually teaching this term, and you finish holding both lines in your own words. Nothing is saved, nothing is sent anywhere, and there is no account. Copy your work out before you close the tab.
0 of 6 written
Name the work before you name the rule. A policy written without an assignment in front of you is the vague policy students complain about.
Not the course. One assignment, the way it appears on your schedule.
What does a student have to be able to do afterward that they could not do before? Write it as a capability, not a deliverable.
Now the student line. MIT’s report says students are not asking for permission. They are asking to be sure. Prohibited, allowed or required, and the reason in your field’s terms.
Split the assignment into its parts and rule on each one. A single verdict on the whole thing is the setting that tells students nothing.
Now the half nobody writes. Your students have already formed a view on this. The only question is whether you say it first.
Slides, examples, problem sets, reading questions, the announcement you sent Monday. Be specific and be honest. If the answer is nowhere, write nowhere.
This is the one students react to hardest. Naming the boundary is worth more than the boundary being wide or narrow.
Last box. This is the test that decides whether the other five were honest.
Not the policy language. What you would actually say, standing in your office, to somebody who is worried they are being judged by a standard you do not hold yourself to.
Both halves of your policy
Read it once, out loud. If line two is harder to say than line one, that is the sentence to fix, not the one to delete.
That is one assignment.
Look at what you just wrote and then look at your schedule. The same decision has to be made for every graded piece of work in this course, in language that stays consistent across all of them, because students read an inconsistency as a policy of its own. Then look at your other sections and your other preps.
The work does not get harder. It gets repeated, and it has to keep agreeing with itself. That is a different problem from the one you just solved by hand, and it is the problem the Syllabus Generator exists for. It is student-centered and accessibility-first, it runs in 19 languages, and it works from your Course Record, which is where your outcomes, your policies and your voice already live, so every document it produces says the same thing about AI without you re deciding it twelve times.
And do the first one by hand anyway. Do it today, on the real assignment, before you open any tool. The line you wrote yourself is the one you will still be able to defend in week six.