OPINION Could chatGPT be the end of the college writing standards?

Plagiarism will not be tolerated; anyone caught cheating on essays or writing assignments will be reported to the dean’s office; plagiarism is theft of others’ ideas and is detrimental to your own education.

On the first day of every class, nearly every professor delivers some form of this statement. Maybe you take the warning seriously, and maybe you don’t. Maybe, if you are a plagiarizer, you think you can get away with it.

Before the days of the internet, you probably would. Plagiarism and other forms of intellectual theft were difficult to punish because identifying instances of it was essentially a crapshoot. A professor or teaching assistant grading an essay had to basically remember some obscure encyclopedia entry or book that they had read before, find the book, compare it to a student’s essay and then make a judgment call about whether its resemblances warranted disciplinary action.

These days, plagiarism is much easier to catch, or at least it was. Programs like Turnitin run similarity checks between submitted essays and, more or less, the entirety of the internet.

Assignments that are too similar to others’ work are flagged and sent to the instructor, who then gets to make a much easier decision concerning disciplinary actions than what the ancients of the pre-internet days did. But times are changing. This semester, Turnitin and other plagiarism catchers are being proven obsolete in the wake of the new, rapidly encroaching technology of artificial intelligence. Professors, instructors, and teaching assistants across LSU and other institutions of higher education are being forced to deal with ChatGPT, or Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, which can create fully-fledged essays on just about any topic with just a few simple commands inputted by its user. Soon it seems college students, not exactly known for their resolute morality, will be able to have essays written for them, to cheat without a way for anyone to catch them.

Some critics of the technology, such as Stephen Marche, have predicted that ChatGPT will mark the end of the college essay. Others aren’t so sure. Ian Bogost, for example, thinks that the AI program produces boring, predictable work that is clearly constructed by inhuman lines of code; at its current best, ChatGPT can’t write much more than a simple five-paragraph essay.

The main problem with Bo - gost’s argument is that a lot of college students, especially freshmen, and especially in Louisiana, aren’t capable of producing even that. In my anecdotal experience as a teaching assistant here at LSU, many young college students aren’t equipped with the requisite writing or literary tools necessary to produce passable writing, a product of a failing secondary education system, rather than an indictment of students’ abilities.

During my three-and-a-half years grading undergraduate work, there have no doubt been a good number of strong writers and good students in the history survey courses I’ve helped teach. With extremely rare exception, just about every class has its own smattering of strong, mediocre and bad students. Each one’s work is more or less synchronous with their dedication to class attendance, preparation and notetaking.

Even the average students struggle at the beginning of the semester to formulate a properly formatted essay: the appearance of a thesis statement, clear paragraph structure and points of argumentation are spotty at best. But by the end of the semester, those students who have read comments, attended review sessions and worked on the craft of writing show a marked improvement over their peers who haven’t.

What these formerly average students have to show for their work are the tools that are earned and inherent in the art of wordsmanship: the ability to form an argument and also the increased capacity to reason, to reflect on a slew of evidence and material and distill it down to its basics, in the process becoming stronger thinkers and potential employees.

For those students who aren’t willing to embark on this difficult process, ChatGPT offers a seductive alternative to less-than-stellar grades or intellectual challenges. If the average original work is worse than what ChatGPT can make, then it might be worth accepting a passing grade in a class in exchange for minimal work, even if that grade isn’t as high as it could be.

This is why one should be skeptical of Bogost’s idea that ChatGPT won’t do much for people and more inclined to believe Marche’s prediction that the program might spell the end of college writing assignments: Subpar colleges students aren’t inclined to care much for the beauty or ingenuity of the style. They tend to care about their grade, and ChatGPT offers that to them in spades.

These problems beg questions for college educators at all levels. Especially here in Louisiana, professors, instructors and teaching assistants fight a daily uphill battle against a decrepit secondary educational system in which students are failing to receive the necessary literary skills to excel at the next level of learning, and business-minded university administrations that accept students who aren’t truly qualified into their rolls.

What are they to do? For one they shouldn’t give in to the pressure or challenges presented by ChatGPT or up-andcoming AI programs. If writing is an absolutely essential part of a person’s intellectual development, which it undoubtedly is, then educators absolutely cannot give up on forcing students to acquire those skills.

For another, they should find alternative ways to combat computer-generated cheating, such as assigning more in-person writing assignments, so long as they take the setting of writing into consideration while they grade.

And finally, they should be patient. Just as Turnitin was developed to stop plagiarism in the wake of the invention of the internet, there will sure be a new market that will be created to stop cheating robot students from mucking up what is the ultimate goal of writing: to be a better thinker.