Nexford AI Policy & Usage Guidelines

Effective Date: September 1, 2025

Nexford University recognizes that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a foundational element of the modern workplace. To prepare learners for career success, our curriculum and policies ensure you develop the skills to use AI strategically, ethically, and effectively.

Core Principle: AI as an Essential Skill

Effective use of AI is a key professional competency. At Nexford, you are required to use AI in select course assignments and encouraged to use AI in most courses to enhance your work and its relevance to professional practices. Our goal is to develop your ability to apply sound judgment, augment AI-generated content with human value, and think critically about this powerful technology.

Required Use of AI in Coursework

In specific assignments, the use of AI is an integral part of the learning and assessment process.

• Opting-Out: If you choose not to use AI for a required assignment, you must formally document this decision. You will need to provide a clear rationale explaining how your alternative approach produces a higher-quality outcome.
  
  
• Assessment:Your work will be evaluated on two dimensions:
  1. The quality of the final output against the course learning objectives.
  2. The effectiveness of your AI usage in completing the assessment.
     
     
• Course Rubrics: Always review the assessment instructions and evaluation rubrics in each course to understand the specific expectations.

Disclosure and Transparency

You must disclose your use of AI in course assessments using the required AI Disclosure Form (Attached to this article). Failure to do so is a violation of the University's Academic Integrity Policy.

Your disclosure must include:

• The specific AI tools you used.
• An explanation of how and why you used them.
• Examples of your initial prompts and any refinements.
• A description of how you evaluated and integrated the AI output into your final work.
• Citations for any external sources used to verify AI-generated content.

Ethical Use and Academic Integrity

As a Nexford learner, you must adhere to the following ethical guidelines:

• Protect Intellectual Property: You may not copy or input Nexford’s proprietary course materials into Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. This is to protect Nexford's intellectual property and to ensure you are engaging directly with the learning content.
  
  
• Add Human Value: You must not submit AI-generated content without meaningful human engagement. Your work should always involve verification, critical evaluation, and contextualization.
  
  
• Updated Plagiarism Policy: Plagiarism is defined as representing words, ideas, or other works of another individual or entity, including AI-generated content, as your own without giving proper credit. Misrepresenting AI work as solely your own constitutes plagiarism.