Here to Help, Not to Author

Professors

Look at ChatGPT in the Classroom

This spring Deans Melissa Michelson and Mouwafac Sidaoui asked faculty to post their thoughts about such questions as whether students should be forbidden to use ChatGPT or if they should instead be taught to think critically about it. Is the use of ChatGPT in violation of academic integrity? How are faculty revamping the way they teach?

Here are excerpts from two of the anonymous answers on the faculty discussion board.

It is impossible to ban using ChatGPT. The students are going to use it, and we have to accept that! We need to teach students that ChatGPT is potentially inaccurate. ChatGPT is pulling from the entire internet, whether it is accurate or not. So it is not a reliable source.

If students are simply copying and pasting ChatGPT, that is technically plagiarism (and it is easy to check through GPTZero). I encourage my students to use ChatGPT as a starting off point to

I’m wary of assuming that it is easy to check whether a student has used ChatGPT. Both anecdotally and in news reports, I’ve heard tales of false positives. See, for example, the article by Victor Tangermann, “There’s a Problem with that App that Detects GPT-Written Text: It’s Not Very Accurate” (in Futurism 9, January 2023).

Here’s the highlight:

“The numbers speak for themselves. GPTZero correctly identified the ChatGPT text in seven out of eight attempts and the human writing six out of eight times. Don’t get us wrong: those results are impressive. But they also indicate that if a teacher or professor tried using the tool to bust students doing coursework with ChatGPT, they would end up falsely accusing nearly 20 percent of them of academic misconduct.” generate ideas, brainstorm, and outline. But they need to make the content their own. It is obvious when the writing is not original.

This is not to say that AI detectors aren’t useful tools. I’m glad GPTZero will be available through Canvas, but I do think we should tread carefully. The English department at the University of Jamestown, for example, has instituted a policy to run a suspected text through 3 detectors.

I would approach any flagged text as I would when I suspect a student of plagiarism, asking the student about their process, why they chose their topic, and how they constructed their argument, questions to demonstrate that they developed the writing themselves.

As faculty, we need to be more creative and thoughtful about what a bot can answer vs. only our students can answer. We faculty need to do the work of updating our quizzes, exams, essay prompts, and discussion questions that will make it impossible for a bot to answer (either by making it a personal reflection, a creative personal project, or tailored in some other way).

And on that note, I think the ChatGPT issue is actually just a symptom of a bigger pedagogical question about how we approach evaluating student writing. A big part of why we assign writing is not about the final product—the essay or text they turn in. It’s about the process.

We want students to get the learning experience of the process—doing the research, learning about the field, evaluating sources and determining which positions are persuasive and well-supported—the critical thinking work that goes along with preparing to write. And the analytical work that is involved in constructing an argument, and organizing and synthesizing information. The thinking-through and clarity of understanding that is a necessary precursor to clarity of expression.

Students often don’t value that process. They don’t see what is lost by taking the shortcut.

But can we really expect them to value the process, if we teach them not to? When we only look at, evaluate, respond to, and give credit for the finished product, it seems like we don’t value the process, so why would they?

The more we scaffold assignments, have students share the stages of their process along the way, and respond to how they write and not just what : first, the more work it becomes for them to try to fake this process, and second, the more opportunities we have to help them see why the process has payoff for them, and build intrinsic motivation to avoid academic dishonesty.