(ESSAY NUMBER 346) Any time I talk or write about teaching in college, I stress the importance of building communications with my students. The question I most often get in return is, “How do you do that?” So, here is an example. I currently have 55 students signed up for the fall semester. I have already sent them an email or two just to introduce myself. From here out, I’ll try to limit my emails to one or two per month. But, here is one that I wrote them this morning because I thought this was important and they would be interested. I am simply trying to let them know in advance what I expect. In addition, I want to open up the lines of communications. I want to seem reasonable to them. I want my thoughts to be clear. I want to be open to their questions and concerns. I have several class mottoes but one of the most important is, “Everything is open for discussion.”
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To: My Intermediate Accounting Students
From: JH
I hope you are off to a great summer. I spent last week at the beach where I read two books (one great, one mediocre), attended a popular movie that was a bit better than mediocre, attended a locally-produced musical that was fantastic, watched a couple of Harry Potter movies in our hotel room (they never seem to grow old), avoided sunburn, and did not think once about Intermediate Accounting.
This morning (back in Richmond), I read an article in today’s New York Times about the use of AI in college (Stanford). Below, I have included the title and a few of the quotes that I found interesting but certainly not surprising. (Read the quotes or read the whole article and feel free to let me know where you agree and where you do not agree. I’m always up for conversation.)
I thought it might be a wise idea on my part to explain my AI “policies” for our fall class. You might as well know before we get started.
--Outside of class you can use A.I. in any way that you think will be of help. Heck, outside of class you can get help in any way that works for you. I think working in groups is an especially smart idea.
--In class, when we are discussing some complex accounting problem and I ask you a question (such as, “what the heck is going on here?” or “what should this person consider doing?”), I do not want you to read an A.I. answer to me. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me what you think/understand/believe. In class, I don’t care (I never really care) whether your answer is right or wrong as long as it is your answer and you can justify it. If I know your answer, then I know how to build on that.
--Test questions will be handled in the same way as class questions (see above).
To me, this makes sense if your coming to understand how to analyze problems and come up with reasonable solutions is one of our main goals. If you have an issue with this approach, let me know. To be redundant, I’m always up for conversation.
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“What A.I. Did to My College Class” (NY Times, 5/17/2026)
By Theo Baker, a senior at Stanford
"A.I. is everything. We talk about it at the dining halls and in history classes, on dates and while smoking with friends, at the gym and in communal dorm bathrooms. Nearly all of higher education has been overtaken by this technology, and Stanford is a case study in how far it can go."
"Cheating has become omnipresent. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t used A.I. to get through some assignment in college, yet the school was at first slow to realize how widespread this would become."
"In our tech-enabled, newly A.I.-powered world, students were increasingly fudging just about everything."
"About halfway through freshman year, some coding classes started requiring students to sign a declaration — “I did not utilize ChatGPT” — to submit each assignment. During the first term these attestations began to appear, I watched a freshman I knew sign the declaration that he’d done his homework without A.I. as ChatGPT was still open in the next window."
"Few cheated in this most overt fashion back then. But a month later, any student could instead turn to a chatbot, plugging in a prompt alone in a dorm room and mindlessly regurgitating the result. “I remember the first time I used it feeling an immediate sense of guilt,” a friend recently told me. 'Now it’s just normal.'”
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In my TEDx talk from 18 months ago, I talk a bit about the importance of communications. That talk can be watched (it is only 11 minutes) at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G20tup61ZxI&t=1s
In my teaching book, I also talk about the importance of communications with students. It can be downloaded for free at:
https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/375/
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