Using AI
How to use AI tools in V348, what's encouraged, what isn't, and how the graded work is designed.
AI tools are welcome in this course. You do not need to hide them, apologize for them, or pretend you worked without them.
The rule, in one line: use AI if it helps you learn. Disclose how you used it, and be able to reproduce, modify, and explain your own work without it.
AI is a legitimate tool here, like Excel or Solver. What this course certifies is not that you can compute a number, which software has done for decades. It is the modeling cycle: building a model, testing it, knowing when its assumptions break, and advising a decision-maker who has to act. So the policy is not about catching you. Honest disclosure is never penalized, and the rules exist so that your grade reflects what you can do and a classmate leaning on AI cannot out-earn you for less work.
How each task is labeled
Every task tells you its tier. Take-homes carry it on the workbook’s Instructions sheet; the exams page states theirs directly. Nothing you hand in for points requires AI.
| Tier | What it means | Where you’ll see it |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 0 | No AI. Unaided, in class. | The midterm and final exams |
| Tier 1 | AI allowed as a tool, disclose it. | The 14 regular take-homes |
| Tier 2 | AI expected. Critiquing it is the whole task. | The ungraded Week 8 debug practice |
Acceptable ways to use AI
All of these leave you able to reproduce your own work, which is the test that matters:
- Explain a concept you didn’t catch: what a shadow price means, why EVPI is a ceiling, why a moving average lags a rising series.
- Debug a formula or a Solver error. Getting Solver to run is not the skill being assessed; interpreting what it returns is.
- Generate extra practice problems to drill a method before the take-home.
- Check your arithmetic after you have done the work yourself: a second pair of eyes, not a substitute.
- Critique your model: “what assumption am I making that could be wrong?”
- Tighten writing you drafted, on a recommendation whose substance is yours.
Unacceptable ways to use AI
- Pasting the assignment into a chatbot and submitting what comes back.
- Submitting a model you cannot rebuild, modify, or explain. This is the core violation.
- Using AI during a Tier 0 exam.
- Leaving the disclosure blank, or writing a false one. Here non-disclosure is the violation, not use: you will not lose points for saying you used AI, only for hiding it.
- Sharing a solved workbook, or a chat transcript containing one.
- Passing off AI-written interpretation as your judgment without engaging with your own numbers.
The disclosure line
Every take-home has a disclosure cell on its Free responses sheet. Fill it in honestly:
I used [tool] to [what for]. One thing it got wrong, or that I had to fix: [what].
“I didn’t use AI on this one” is a perfectly good answer. If you did use it, the “what I had to fix” part is where the learning often shows: catching that the tool rounded a Solver result in a way that broke a constraint is exactly the skill this course is after.
Why honest use costs you nothing
Two things keep the grade yours. The exams are unaided, so twice in the term you answer questions from work you have already done with no help available. And most written prompts hinge on a value that exists only in your solved model: your shadow price, your cumulative error, your probability of a loss. A confident, generic answer is not merely weaker there; it is usually wrong.
The flip side is Week 8’s debug practice, where you are handed a plausible but subtly broken model and asked to fix it. AI is allowed and it is still hard, and it is the most realistic task here: in practice you will far more often inherit someone else’s model than build one. Work you cannot reproduce or explain unaided may not receive credit.
If you’re stuck
Reaching for a chatbot because you are lost is often the slower path: it gets you a submitted file and leaves you no better prepared for the exam. Come to office hours, ask your TA, work the ungraded self-checks, or bring the problem to the group practice. Asking a person is the faster route.
Academic integrity
Failing to disclose AI use, or submitting work you cannot reproduce or explain, are academic-integrity violations handled under IU policy. Everything published on this site is cleared for pasting into a chatbot under the written permission on the Policies page; that does not stretch to the Tier 0 exams, another student’s work, or anything handed out in class. If you are unsure whether a use is acceptable, ask us before you submit.