The state of AI adoption at Monash University

The Monash Artificial Intelligence Operations Policy suite, effective 16 September 2024, comprises a Policy and a Procedure setting principles for responsible use, AI governance, and shared responsibility for legal and ethical obligations across education, research and operational activities. Companion documents include the Generative AI Shared Responsibility Model (staff-only) and discipline-specific guidance for academic research.^[1][2]

Monash does not use a numbered tier or lane scheme. Instead, the assessment framework is presented as four 'considerations for assessment conditions': AI tools may be used within the educator's guidelines; evidence of unassisted human knowledge and skill is required; visible evidence of learning and contemporary academic integrity; and programmatic, authentic and future-focused assessment.^[3]

The key clause sits with the Chief Examiner: 'Chief Examiners, who are responsible for the assessment regimes in units, must specify where and how AI may be used in assessments. AI use also needs to be clearly and openly acknowledged by students. Any restrictions placed on AI use must be for clearly articulated pedagogical or accreditation reasons and accompanied by appropriate assessment security measures.'^[3]

Monash has been notably resistant to default-on AI detection. DVC (Education) Professor Allie Clemans, in parliamentary testimony to the Australian inquiry into generative AI in education, framed the institutional approach as 'to educate our way out and to err on the side of opening up and proper use, rather than to set up the conditions for misuse.'^[4]

Bloom runs on Microsoft Azure OpenAI under enterprise data handling, with prompts and responses excluded from base-model training. The data posture is consistent with the Monash Artificial Intelligence Operations Policy suite, effective September 2024, and Bloom can be deployed under Chief Examiner authority at the unit level.^[1]

Bloom can be deployed at Monash in a day, with unit-specific material ingestion and Chief-Examiner-controlled student access. No new procurement, no new vendor security review, and no engineering integration is required.

Monash provides two primary GenAI services free to coursework students: a Microsoft Copilot enterprise rollout, and a Studiosity feedback integration delivered through Moodle. The Library publishes citation guidance for ChatGPT in APA 7, MLA 9 and Harvard styles, treating GenAI use as a citable event regardless of which tool is used.

Monash's institutional AI research is led by two centres: the Monash AI Institute in the Faculty of IT, directed by Professor Shonali Krishnaswamy (also inaugural Associate Dean Innovation, appointed 2025); and the Monash Data Futures Institute, a cross-faculty initiative.^[8]

Professor Geoff Webb, of the Faculty of IT, was awarded a $3.9M Australian Laureate Fellowship in 2025 and led LLM4SD, a generative-AI scientific discovery tool released in early 2025. Webb has framed the imperative directly: 'We are already fully immersed in the age of generative AI and we need to start harnessing this as much as possible to advance science, while ensuring we are developing it ethically.'^[9]

On the infrastructure side, Monash announced MAVERIC in August 2025: an AU$60M NVIDIA GB200 NVL72-based supercomputer, the first Australian higher-education deployment of its kind, with construction in 2025 and activation in early 2026.^[10]