For the 2025-2026 school year, there were 43 candidates and slates for Student Government positions, each required to have a candidate-written platform. With the rise of the use of artificial intelligence in schoolwork such as essays and writing assignments, Parker has incorporated policies against the concern of “Academic Dishonesty” in the handbook. Even so, nowhere in the Student Government Election Manual is there any clause or mention of the use of AI in the campaign process, including the platform.
This year, freshman Cristian Orozco was planning to run for MX Communications but ultimately did not. For him, the main issue was the time he would need to put into writing his platform. He contemplated the use of AI. The advantage is you’re done faster, but the disadvantage is you don’t know what you’re saying,” Orozco said.
AI is capable of producing highly realistic and professional work, but as Orozco explained, students are not the ones creating the work, so they might not fully know or stand for what was generated. This is a matter that ties into academics at Parker which has been noticed by Upper School history teacher Jeanne Barr.
“I try to tell my students, ‘please don’t use it,’ and have the conversation about how AI is robbing them of their ability to develop thinking processes and brain synapses,” Barr said. With just a few prompts, sentences, or simple words of input, generative AI is able to create lengthy writing pieces, which, according to Barr, can be difficult to spot.
“It depends on how much access I have to their actual authentic writing,” Barr said. Whether a piece of writing is constructed by AI is a subjective conclusion and depends on if the reader has reason to believe that this technology was used. Some teachers base their findings on in-class, authentic writing samples from the beginning of the school year, which presents challenges for some Student Government candidates who have not previously presented writing to the student body or Cabinet officials.
“There’s red flags, different phrasings, word choices, structure, format, punctuation, though there’s no foolproof detector,” said Barr.
There are many AI detectors available to use, one being “gptzero.me” When the platforms of single candidates, excluding any visuals or “qualification” portions, were put into this AI scanner, the average percentage score was around 87% human written, with some reaching 100% human written, and some in the 20% and 30% range.
Reliance on AI detectors is not optimal, though, as they might not be fully accurate in their findings.
One candidate’s platform came back from the AI scanner as 22% human-written, and “actually writing it took maybe five days,” the anonymous candidate said. The candidate addressed assumptions about their platform being AI-generated. “A lot of people’s writing styles are different,” they said, and this is a common consensus among people questioning the use of AI in platform-writing.
The Election Manual has a multi-step guide to writing a platform, beginning with font, formatting, headers, and mechanics. As for the composition of the platform, there are three main bullet-pointed goals required and examples of what could be included, all with a maximum word count of 1,500 or 2,000 words.
The Election Manual is updated “each year before election season begins, though the previous year’s manual is used as a template,” Executive Advisor Zarin Mehta said. “Only small things” were changed this year, mainly changes within positions and the new schedule. He advises against AI being allowed in the future years for campaigning, and it is definitely a plausible change should the Upper School decide it. “A change to the Election Manual would be easy to disallow candidates from using AI for any campaign purposes,” Mehta said.
If the Election Manual is amended for the following years to include policies against the use of AI in platform writing, one challenge may be that there is no way to know if a candidate may have used AI in their platform. After all, in the Upper School, teachers only have to “suspect” the use of AI to deem an assignment academically dishonest. With amendments to the Election Manual regarding the use of AI, Student Government may follow in the footsteps of common cases within the Upper School about academic dishonesty.