Recall
For students, teachers and anyone writing an AI policy

Where the line is with AI and coursework.

A three-column split of what's fine, what needs asking about, and what isn't. Plus two questions that settle the cases the columns don't cover. Free to copy, print, adapt, or paste into a syllabus.

Written by Steve Gustafson

I write Steve's AI Guide, a free set of guides on using AI well. I'm an AI consultant and the co-founder of a software company. I build with these tools daily.

I am not an educator, and this is not institutional policy. I wrote it because the guidance students were getting was either "don't" or nothing, and neither describes how the tools actually get used at 1am. It's grounded in learning science, not in a compliance framework — the sources are at the bottom.

Nothing here is for sale. No signup, no ads, no affiliate links. Use it however's useful, including without credit.

The three columns

Your institution's own policy always wins. This is for the cases it doesn't cover, which is most of them.

Go for it
  • Making practice questions from your own material
  • Having a concept explained to you
  • Quizzing yourself and building flashcards
  • Critiquing a draft you wrote
  • Organising notes you took
  • Getting deadlines onto a calendar
Ask first
  • AI-assisted outlining
  • Grammar and clarity passes
  • Brainstorming thesis options
  • Debugging code in CS courses
  • Translating your own writing
  • Transcribing or summarising a lecture
Don't
  • Turning in AI text as your own
  • Having it write the paper
  • Answering graded work with it
  • Citations you haven't opened and checked
  • Anything you'd hide from your instructor

The two questions

Most cases don't fit a column cleanly. These settle them, and a student can apply both in about five seconds.

If either answer is no, stop
  1. The disclosure test. Could you tell your instructor exactly what you did, in detail, without being asked?
  2. The deletion test. If every AI tool vanished tomorrow, would you still know this material?

Fail either one and you didn't study. You outsourced.

The rule underneath all of it

Every column above comes from one line: AI generates the questions. You generate the answers.

That isn't a moral posture, it's what the evidence supports. Retrieving something from your own memory is the act that installs it. Outsource the retrieval and you outsource the learning — and you don't find out until the exam, which is why researchers named the effect cognitive debt.

The nuance matters too. Offloading work to a machine isn't automatically harmful; Lodge and Loble argued in 2026 that what matters is what you do with the freed capacity. Spend it on something harder and you come out ahead. Spend it on nothing and you've bought debt.

For a syllabus

Paste this in and edit it to fit. No attribution needed.

syllabus paragraph

AI tools are permitted in this course for learning, and not for producing work you submit. You may use them to generate practice questions, explain concepts, quiz yourself, build flashcards, organise your own notes, and critique a draft you wrote yourself. You may not use them to write, rewrite or draft any part of an assignment, to answer graded work, or to supply citations you have not opened and verified. If you are unsure, apply two tests. Could you describe exactly what you did, unprompted, to me? And if every AI tool disappeared tomorrow, would you still know this material? If the answer to either is no, you have crossed the line. Ask me before using AI in any way not listed here. Asking is never penalised.

See the 24 student prompts

Where this comes from

Kosmyna et al., MIT Media Lab (2025). 54 people wrote essays under EEG across three sessions. The group using an AI assistant showed the weakest neural engagement, underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioural levels, and struggled to quote essays they had finished minutes earlier. The authors named the effect cognitive debt. Published as a preprint and not peer reviewed at release.

Gerlich, Societies (2025). A survey of 666 people found frequent AI use correlated negatively with critical thinking, with cognitive offloading as the mediating mechanism. The youngest participants scored worst.

Dunlosky et al., Psychological Science in the Public Interest (2013). Graded ten study techniques. Practice testing and distributed practice rated high utility. Highlighting, rereading and summarising rated low.

Lodge and Loble (2026). Argued that cognitive offloading is not inherently harmful and that the outcome depends on what the learner does with the freed capacity.