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One of the most unpleasant aspects of teaching is grading. Judging people is never fun. Dealing with those people every day for months makes it even less fun. The process was made even more jarring when it turned out that students were using AI chatbots like ChatGPT to try to gain an edge. From a teacher’s perspective, it feels like a betrayal. I tried my best and you respond by trying to end-run the ratings.
Unfortunately, the bot-creating horse was bolted on long ago. The stables are not empty. Burning.
So what is the correct response to ChatGPT in education? Is there even one correct answer?
Before we get into the whys and whys of ChatGPT, let’s move on to the conclusion. It is important not to participate in an arms race. I don’t want to spend my limited time and energy trying to detect the use of writing instruments. I don’t want to pay a lot of money to access a tool that detects bot-generated text. I also don’t think avoiding the bot’s output and reverting heavily to written exams is an acceptable solution. We have already generated a large number of students who can pass exams without being able to apply what they “know” in practice.
You have to ask what you want to rate. Also, do we really need to use what bots can produce (essays and reports) as a proxy for assessment?
ChatGPT is the latest
Students have been using writing instruments for a long time. Grammarly and QuilBot have paraphrased student writing for as long as it has existed. Before that, it was normal to have a more fluent friend help me get the phrasing and flow right. Essay factories have been churning out paid papers forever. In short, ChatGPT is new only in the sense that it’s accessible, and it tends to generate a lot of nonsense.
But ChatGPT is also different from tools like QuilBot and Grammarly. The latter tool suggests improvements to existing text. Don’t write the whole essay. From my point of view as a science and technology teacher, these writing instruments are what students can learn if they want to improve their writing. was.
This is not the case for my wife who teaches English in high school. Since English is a second language for most students, vocabulary and grammar (exactly what he QuilBot and Grammarly are aimed at) remain important points of assessment. Her high school students have a wide range of English proficiency, some close to native speakers, while others can only express simple ideas. The focus shifts to communicating fluidly. Previous tools were only useful when assignments were written and students had already constructed their arguments.
ChatGPT changes the formula. You can feel the charm of chatbots even in the classes my wife teaches. For the best students, they don’t have to do what they can already do. For struggling students, almost certain failures turn into chances of passing.
Part of the high school assessment is the writing portfolio, and ChatGPT is working hard here. Some portfolios, including portfolio construction considerations, were created entirely by ChatGPT. ChatGPT has no context, only statistics, so some of the reflections that were supposed to describe the student’s experience in doing the assignment mentioned a number of random sentences that weren’t in their portfolio .
School administrators are unsure how to proceed. Unlike plagiarism, the case for using ChatGPT is less clear and no one wants to face the threat of a lawyer.
In the technical courses I teach, ChatGPT’s appeal is high and ChatGPT’s usefulness is less obvious. My student is required to do research related to one of the practical projects and that research will be partially assessed in the form of a project report chapter. Can ChatGPT really provide prompts that provide enough context for student research projects?
Despite that question, I’ve also seen written material from ChatGPT. The questionable ChatGPT chapter was poorly sourced, superficial, unvoiced, and boring. In that chapter, different sections were supposedly written by different students, but the voice, style, and source weren’t changed at all. The writing was clear and flowed well.
