One undergraduate student’s thesis was rejected because it was written using AI that was not approved by the university. “I didn’t know that. I thought it was okay to use AI,” he complained. Students were forced to revise their papers to a level of AI impact that the university considered “acceptable.”
An MPhil student was left embarrassed after his thesis was rejected by his supervisor after it was discovered that he had used an AI tool to transcribe part of his research interview. He was told by his boss that there should be no AI influence in your paper. “We used AI tools to transcribe the interviews,” said the MPhil scholar, who is also an educator. “I was almost considered a plagiarist, someone who was letting AI do the work. If I had been told clearly whether I could use AI in my work, to what extent, and even if I could, I would have approached the paper differently,” he said. “I wish I didn’t have to be so embarrassed.”
unwritten rules
It appears that the institutions these students studied at have their own “unspoken” AI policies, which are probably not properly communicated to students or are (deliberately) misunderstood by them.
In any case, these two cases can be seen as representing a lack of comprehensive policies regarding the ethical use of AI, not only for teachers but also for students and teachers. On a positive note, we see university professors using their own personal discretion or established policies to decide whether and to what extent they allow students to use AI. But even such unofficial and “unofficial” guidelines appear to be completely absent for teachers teaching high school students, and the use of AI is also less common among high school students.
While students are increasingly using AI tools, no one is telling them whether they are using AI tools for the right purpose and in the right way. This is because the direct instructors, the teachers, know little or nothing about AI tools. Teachers themselves are also not informed to what extent and how they can utilize AI. Surprisingly, there is no national data on AI use by students and teachers in Nepal. Anecdotal evidence suggests that students who have access to smartphones and computers use them to the point of becoming overly dependent on them.
So how should teachers respond to this phenomenon? How should students use it? How much is acceptable? How should teachers guide students about the ethical use of AI? The answers to these questions largely depend on the policies of individual institutions and/or the discretion of individual educators.
In its Teacher Competency Framework (2015), the Ministry of Education’s Center for Educational Human Resource Development (CEHRD), which aims to support teacher capacity development, recognizes that information and communication technology (ICT) is a powerful tool for effective teaching and learning, and that teachers are encouraged to facilitate learning. They must be competent in selecting and using ICT-integrated learning strategies to progress, developing digital materials according to the needs of learners, adapting and using available materials, and using ICT for assessment and delivery. Feedback on learning, being familiar with the development of ICT policy and digital culture in education, and demonstrating appropriate professional behavior.
However, CERHD does not have any policies or guidelines regarding the use of AI for teachers. “Teacher training teaches teachers what we know about the ethical use of ICT. Guidelines on how to use AI in education have not been developed yet. It seems we need to start working on them now,” said Gauri Shankar Pandey, teacher trainer and director at CERHD. “We’ve been working on the ICT side, but we haven’t yet integrated it with AI. We need to integrate it and create guidelines for teachers and students on when and how best to use AI in the classroom.”
The highly ambitious AI policy, announced in August 2025, “integrates AI into existing information technology systems to promote good governance and improve the quality, accessibility and efficiency of public service delivery across all three tiers of government in sectors such as agriculture, education, health, industry, finance, public services and security,” without mentioning how school and university teachers will be trained in the use of AI or who will do the training.
Time to codify
Countries such as Austria, Japan, Finland, and the United Kingdom have guidelines and active curriculum policies regarding AI in schools, while countries such as the United States and China have laws and policies governing the use of AI in higher education. Indeed, this appears to be a work in progress. Because less than 10 percent of schools and universities have formal institutional guidance on the use of AI, according to a 2023 UNESCO global survey. There is no reason for Nepali educational institutions to remain outside of that 10 percent data.
As an educator, I spend a significant amount of time understanding how AI is impacting the way we teach and learn. With limited or no opportunity to touch upon, experience, and share how educators in other regions are rethinking pedagogy and addressing the challenges and opportunities created by AI regarding the use of instructional technology, lesson planning, and effective instruction in the classroom, classroom educators in Nepal may have little awareness of global trends or may be improvising based on a limited understanding of the use of AI.
Educators in Nepal should be better able to guide their students. National and international organizations working in the education sector in Nepal may be able to pay some attention to this need to train teachers and students on AI. AI is predicted to transform the education system in ways the world has never seen before.
(The author is a journalist and educator based in Kathmandu.)
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