Harnessing GenAI: Hong Kong Undergraduate Students’ Attitudes on the Role of AI Tools in Learning and Assessment

Since the bloom of generative AI (gen AI) tools following a powerful version of ChatGPT 3.5 in late 2022, the education sector has been the site of direct impact regarding its ethical use in students’ studies. In Hong Kong, tertiary institutions’ attitudes towards gen AI have remained open yet cautious, with policies that guide students on how and when to use gen AI in learning, teaching and assessment. However, in institutions where such guidelines are set less clearly, students may find it difficult to cope with the requirements of different subjects. Therefore, to set unambiguous gen AI guidelines for teaching and learning, investigating students’ views on using gen AI for their studies is necessary.

The present paper reports on the findings arising from the semi-structured group interviews with 20 undergraduate students from two self-financed tertiary institutions. The interviews lasted 60 minutes on average, covering topics regarding how the interviewees and their peers use gen AI tools tofor learning and assessment. Content analysis was adopted to identify their knowledge about the tools (e.g., knowing about such tools before and during their undergraduate study), degree of familiarity with the tools), purposes of using the tool, and so on. Preliminary findings suggest that the students welcome assessments allowing the use of GenAI, or those in which they cannot simply use such technology to generate answers (e.g., recording videos or drawing). In general, they reported not overly relying on gen AI outputs, although individuals reflected occasional use of ChatGPT for generating texts for written assessments. Potential implications will be discussed regarding enhancing teaching practitioners’ digital literacy to master gen AI tools for designing teaching and assessment materials, as well as providing adaptive support to empower students to use such tools ethically and transparently, rather than to delegate thinking processes to artificial intelligence.