The AI Assessment Scale (AIAS) provides clear guidelines across five levels, ranging from no AI use to full AI integration, so students know exactly what is expected of them in each assessment. This structure ensures that students use AI ethically and effectively to support their learning while maintaining academic integrity. This page provides guidance on Level 2: AI Planning.
Level 2: AI Planning
‘AI may be used for pre-task activities such as brainstorming, outlining and initial research. This level focuses on the effective use of AI for planning, synthesis, and ideation, but assessments should emphasise the ability to develop and refine these ideas independently.’
You may use AI for planning, idea development, and research. Your final submission should show how you have developed and refined these ideas.
Students can think of it as
“AI can help me in idea-generation, not writing. I can brainstorm or plan with GenAI, but the final work must be completely mine.”
What’s allowed?
- Using GenAI for generating questions and/or ideas and outlines
- Prompt engineering to deeply explore subject topics and how to structure their writing
- Use of Elicit/SciSpace etc. AI for sourcing and interacting with academic references
What’s not allowed?
- Inclusion of GenAI-generated content in the final submission
- Automated referencing or citation generation without verification by the student: If used, these must be checked manually for accuracy.
Why/Rationale
This encourages early engagement with GenAI as a thinking tool while maintaining authorship and independent synthesis in the final product.
Examples
Lab Reports
Students use a GenAI tool to brainstorm different approaches to their experiment and can use GenAI to generate an outline of their report. However, the final written report is completely their own work, with no AI-generated content included.
Essays & Written Pieces
Students use a GenAI tool to help brainstorm topics and create an outline for an essay or written piece. The GenAI may suggest structure and key points, that they can follow, but the final essay is written entirely by the students, without any AI-generated text included.
Presentations
Students use a GenAI tool to brainstorm topics and create an outline for their presentation. The AI helps them organise their ideas, but the final slides and speech are created by the students without any AI-generated content.
Other Projects
Students use an AI tool to generate ideas and sketches. The AI helps them explore different themes and compositions, but the final product is created entirely by the students, using their own skills and creativity.
What is GenAI?
GenAI is technology that can create new content like text, images, or code, based on patterns it has learned from large amounts of data. GenAI technology includes tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Claude. These are also called Large Language Models (LLMs) and provide chat-like services to users, in the style of a conversation. There are other tools which students might use, like those which convert text-to-images (e.g. Midjourney, DALLE) and those which convert text-to-video (e.g. Sora, Veo 3).