Can you use AI on QCE assessments? The rules, in plain English

Short answer: AI is not banned from your life as a QCE student, but the work you submit has to be yours— and the line between "study aid" and "someone else wrote this" is drawn by academic-integrity rules that existed long before chatbots. Here is where that line sits in practice, and the questions to ask before you touch any tool.

The principle underneath every rule

QCE internal assessment certifies what youcan do. Submitting text that a tool generated — even a paragraph, even "rephrased" — is the same breach as submitting a friend's paragraph or an essay-mill's paragraph. It doesn't matter that the tool is new; the rule it breaks is old. Schools also routinely require you to declare that submitted work is your own, so a generated section isn't just against the rules — it's a false declaration you signed.

Your school sets the specifics — actually ask

QCAA sets the framework, but your school decides and communicates what's permitted on each assessment instrument. That means the real answer to "can I use AI for this IA?" lives with your teacher, not with any website — including this one. Two questions worth asking directly:

• "Am I allowed to use software that gives feedbackon my own draft for this task?"
• "If yes, do you want me to acknowledge or declare it, and how?"

Asking first is not a red flag to your teacher — it's the opposite. The students who get in trouble are the ones who never asked.

A useful mental test: generation vs. reaction

Most grey areas resolve if you ask one question: did the tool produce words that ended up in my submission, or did it react to words I had already written?

• Generation— the tool writes sentences, rewrites your sentences, or "improves" your paragraph and you paste the result in. That's the tool doing the assessed skill. Don't submit it.
• Reaction — the tool points at your sentence and says "this describes, but your marking criterion asks you to justify" — and then you decide what to write. The assessed skill still happened in your head.

This is the same distinction the drafting rules already draw for humans: a teacher giving feedback on your draft may indicate where problems are, but isn't there to rewrite your work for you. A tool should be held to the same standard you'd hold a teacher, tutor, or parent reading your draft.

Where Ate-ar deliberately sits

We built Ate-ar on the reaction side of that line, by architecture rather than by policy: the AI in Ate-ar cannot write into your document. It reads your task sheet and its marking guide, then attaches feedback beside your own writing — what a criterion is asking for, where your draft currently sits against it, what kind of evidence is missing. Every word in your document is typed by you.

That design doesn't exempt you from the rules above. Your school still decides whether feedback software is permitted on a given task, and an honest declaration is still yours to make. Ate-ar is independent — not affiliated with or endorsed by QCAA — and feedback is rigorous, not a guarantee of any result: your marker makes one holistic judgement, and no tool can promise where it lands.

The rules of thumb, on one hand

1. If a tool wrote it, don't submit it.
2. Ask your teacher before the task, not after.
3. Declare what your school asks you to declare.
4. Use tools that react to your writing, not tools that replace it.
5. When in doubt, imagine explaining your process to your marker out loud. If that conversation feels fine, you're fine.