While grading essays for his world religions course last
month, Antony Aumann, a professor of philosophy at Northern Michigan
University, read what he said was easily “the best paper in the class”. It
explored the morality of burqa bans with clean paragraphs, fitting examples,
and rigorous arguments.
اضافة اعلان
A red flag instantly went up.
Aumann confronted his student over whether he had written the
essay himself. The student confessed to using
ChatGPT, a chatbot that delivers
information, explains concepts, and generates ideas in simple sentences — and,
in this case, had written the paper.
Alarmed by his discovery, Aumann decided to transform essay
writing for his courses this semester. He plans to require students to write
first drafts in the classroom, using browsers that monitor and restrict computer
activity. In later drafts, students have to explain each revision. Aumann, who
may forgo essays in subsequent semesters, also plans to weave ChatGPT into
lessons by asking students to evaluate the chatbot’s responses.
“What’s happening in class is no longer going to be, ‘Here are
some questions — let’s talk about it between us human beings,’” he said, but
instead “it’s like, ‘What also does this alien robot think?’”
Across the US, university professors like Aumann, department
chairs, and administrators are starting to overhaul classrooms in response to
ChatGPT, prompting a potentially huge shift in teaching and learning. Some
professors are redesigning their courses entirely, making changes that include
more oral exams, group work, and handwritten assessments in lieu of typed ones.
The moves are part of a real-time grapple with a new
technological wave known as generative artificial intelligence.
ChatGPT, which
was released in November by the artificial intelligence
lab OpenAI, is at the
forefront of the shift. The chatbot generates eerily articulate and nuanced
text in response to short prompts, with people using it to write love letters,
poetry, fan fiction — and their schoolwork.
In higher education, colleges and universities have been reluctant to ban the AI tool because administrators doubt the move would be effective and they do not want to infringe on academic freedom. That means the way people teach is changing instead.
That has upended some middle and high schools, with teachers and
administrators trying to discern whether students are using the chatbot to do
their schoolwork. Some public school systems, including in New York City and
Seattle, have since banned the tool on school Wi-Fi networks and devices to
prevent cheating, although students can easily find workarounds to access
ChatGPT.
In higher education, colleges and universities have been
reluctant to ban the AI tool because administrators doubt the move would be
effective and they do not want to infringe on academic freedom. That means the
way people teach is changing instead.
“We try to institute general policies that certainly back up the
faculty member’s authority to run a class,” instead of targeting specific
methods of cheating, said Joe Glover, provost of the University of Florida.
“This isn’t going to be the last innovation we have to deal with.”
That is especially true as generative AI is in its early days.
OpenAI is expected to soon release another tool, GPT-4, which is better at
generating text than previous versions. Google has built LaMDA, a rival
chatbot, and Microsoft is discussing a $10 billion investment in OpenAI.
Silicon Valley startups, including Stability AI and Character.AI, are also
working on generative AI tools.
An
OpenAI spokesperson said the lab recognized its programs
could be used to mislead people and was developing technology to help people
identify text generated by ChatGPT.
“We try to institute general policies that certainly back up the faculty member’s authority to run a class,”
At many universities, ChatGPT has now vaulted to the top of the
agenda. Administrators are establishing task forces and hosting university-wide
discussions to respond to the tool, with much of the guidance being to adapt to
the technology.
At schools including George Washington University in Washington,
DC, Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Appalachian State
University in Boone, North Carolina, professors are phasing out take-home,
open-book assignments — which became a dominant method of assessment in the
pandemic but now seem vulnerable to chatbots. They are instead opting for
in-class assignments, handwritten papers, group work, and oral exams.
Gone are prompts like “write five pages about this or that.”
Some professors are instead crafting questions that they hope will be too
clever for chatbots and asking students to write about their own lives and
current events.
Students are “plagiarizing this because the assignments can be
plagiarized,” said Sid Dobrin, chair of the English department at the
University of Florida.
Frederick Luis Aldama, the humanities chair at the University of
Texas at Austin, said he planned to teach newer or more niche texts that
ChatGPT might have less information about, such as William Shakespeare’s early
sonnets instead of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
The chatbot may motivate “people who lean into canonical,
primary texts to actually reach beyond their comfort zones for things that are
not online,” he said.
In case the changes fall short of preventing plagiarism, Aldama
and other professors said they planned to institute stricter standards for what
they expect from students and how they grade. It is now not enough for an essay
to have just a thesis, introduction, supporting paragraphs and a conclusion.
“We need to up our game,” Aldama said. “The imagination,
creativity, and innovation of analysis that we usually deem an A paper needs to
be trickling down into the B-range papers.”
“We want to prevent things from happening instead of catch them when they happen.”
Universities are also aiming to educate students about the new
AI tools. The University at Buffalo in New York and Furman University in
Greenville, South Carolina, said they planned to embed a discussion of AI tools
into required courses that teach entering or freshman students about concepts
such as academic integrity.
“We have to add a scenario about this, so students can see a
concrete example,” said Kelly Ahuna, who directs the academic integrity office
at the University at Buffalo. “We want to prevent things from happening instead
of catch them when they happen.”
Other universities are trying to draw boundaries for AI.
Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Vermont in Burlington
are drafting revisions to their academic integrity policies so their plagiarism
definitions include generative AI.
John Dyer, vice president for enrollment services and educational
technologies at Dallas Theological Seminary, said the language in his
seminary’s honor code felt “a little archaic anyway.” He plans to update its
plagiarism definition to include: “using text written by a generation system as
one’s own (e.g., entering a prompt into an artificial intelligence tool and
using the output in a paper).”
The misuse of AI tools will most likely not end, so some
professors and universities said they planned to use detectors to root out that
activity. The plagiarism detection service Turnitin said it would incorporate
more features for identifying AI, including ChatGPT, this year.
More than 6,000 teachers from Harvard University, Yale
University, the University of Rhode Island, and others have also signed up to
use GPTZero, a program that promises to quickly detect AI-generated text, said
Edward Tian, its creator and a senior at Princeton University.
Some students see value in embracing AI tools to learn. Lizzie
Shackney, 27, a student at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school and
design school, has started using ChatGPT to brainstorm for papers and debug
coding problem sets.
“There are disciplines that want you to share and don’t want you
to spin your wheels,” she said, describing her computer science and statistics
classes. “The place where my brain is useful is understanding what the code
means.”
But she has qualms.
ChatGPT, Shackney said, sometimes
incorrectly explains ideas and misquotes sources. The University of
Pennsylvania also has not instituted any regulations about the tool, so she does
not want to rely on it in case the school bans it or considers it to be
cheating, she said.
Other students have no such scruples, sharing on forums such as
Reddit that they have submitted assignments written and solved by ChatGPT — and
sometimes done so for fellow students too. On TikTok, the hashtag #chatgpt has
more than 578 million views, with people sharing videos of the tool writing
papers and solving coding problems.
One video shows a student copying a multiple choice exam and
pasting it into the tool with the caption saying: “I don’t know about y’all but
ima just have Chat GPT take my finals. Have fun studying.”
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