Core Competencies

To ensure that students are prepared for the evolving workforce, students will need to have certain expertise, skills, and knowledge.

AI in Teaching/Learning

By adopting core competencies, NJIT is committed to graduating students who can demonstrate mastery of the following characteristics as they relate to AI:

  1. Prompt engineering 

  2. Ethical awareness  

  3. Data literacy 

  4. Critical thinking 

  5. Continuous learning 

Student competencies will be demonstrated on two levels: (1) an understanding of AI technology topics in the broader cultural, academic, and professional contexts and (2) the ability to apply AI technologies in their disciplinary fields. 

  • Prompt engineering: An NJIT student should be able to query/engage AI technologies. To this end, an understanding of prompt engineering and the impact of a chosen model on generated outcomes is important. Students should understand concepts such as models, seeds, variations, and different types of prompts: text-to-image, image-to-image, etc.
  • Ethical awareness: An NJIT student should understand when to query/engage AI technologies. This requires defining accepted practices, understanding the degree of the acknowledgment of AI tools required, and understanding data ownership.
  • Data literacy: An NJIT student should have an understanding of how data is collected, processed, and analyzed for use by an AI model. Students should be aware of the difficulties typically encountered when gathering data for use in training AI, including difficulties in finding sufficient amounts of data and extracting data from sources that may not be easily accessible.
  • Critical thinking: An NJIT student should have an understanding of the use, misuse, and limits of AI technologies in the context of traditional methods. Students should have an understanding of various biases associated with AI technologies, including automation bias. Students should develop an inquisitive skepticism regarding generative AI content and work on the ability to distinguish between human- and AI-generated content. 
  • Continuous learning: An NJIT student should have current, hands-on experience with AI tools. NJIT is committed to developing/promoting best practices for students in the form of tutorials and coursework.