Universities Amend Teaching Methods Over ChatGPT

Universities Amend Teaching Methods Over ChatGPT

News by Marge Serrano
Published: January 17, 2023

Philosophy Professor Antony Aumann of Northern Michigan University encountered what he dubbed one of "the best papers in the class." But Aumann was alarmed instead of delighted by the impeccable discourse on the ethics of outlawing the burqa.

The professor immediately interrogated his student and found out that another entity predictably wrote the essay. But instead of "someone else," the plagiarism was from "something else."

Enter, ChatGPT. The hottest topic in artificial intelligence with its revolutionary GPT3 language-learning model and the budding best friend of a growing number of student users.

To combat the usage of ChatGPT, Aumann reconstructed his writing activities by requiring students to create their drafts during face-to-face classes. Meanwhile, succeeding revisions must be thoroughly explained and justified by the students.

Aumann, considering ditching essays as an activity, is instead planning to absorb ChatGPT in his curriculum by having his students deliberate over the AI chatbot's responses to the lesson prompts.

This scenario is nothing new, however, as teachers and academicians all over the globe scramble to tackle the educational disruption that ChatGPT's innovation brings.


The Consensus on ChatGPT

Responses towards ChatGPT are varied, with some schools opting to ban the app outright such as in the case of New York City and Seattle public schools. On the other hand, tertiary schools hesitate to disregard the chatbot citing academic freedom and educational evolution.

The University of Florida Provost Joe Glover points out that innovation is inevitable as ChatGPT will not be the last advancement that would reshape existing teaching methods.

Glover adds, "We try to institute general policies that certainly back up the faculty member's authority to run a class."

Regardless, countermeasures are also being set up against ChatGPT. The antiplagiarism tool Turnitin is already developing an AI detection feature to prevent plagiarism.

GPTZero, a ChatGPT detector developed by Edward Tian, is currently just as swamped as the ChatGPT servers. The difference is that instead of students, the sign-ups are from over 6,000 teachers from prestigious schools such as Yale University, Harvard University, and the University of Rhode Island.

OpenAI acknowledges the risks posed by ChatGPT and is already working on its countermeasures against the abuse of its app.


Higher Standards in the Horizon

While students are currently enjoying the benefits of ChatGPT, this is likely to change as schools intend to give more demanding schoolwork to outwit the chatbot or simply increase the standards for grading written outputs.

English Department Chair Sid Dobrin of the University of Florida explains that this is happening only because "the assignments can be plagiarized."

Another tactic schools are executing to combat ChatGPT is its intentional usage of non-standard texts. Instead of using "A midsummer night's dream," the University of Texas Humanities Chair Frederick Luis Aldama will be switching to Shakespeare's earlier works.

Aldama resolves to step up their game and that "the imagination, creativity, and innovation of analysis that we usually deem an A paper needs to be trickling down into the B-range papers."

Schools like Rutgers University, George Washington University and Appalachian State University are also considering reverting to onsite handwritten outputs, graded recitations and group works.

Colleges like the University of Vermont and A.I. Washington University intend to revise the policies in their handbook by including AI-generated text as plagiarism.


The Pro ChatGPT Spectrum

Predictably, students like the University of Pennsylvania's Lizzie Shackney favor incorporating the aid of ChatGPT when doing her homework and projects. Shackney has been using the app as a consultant for her academic outputs and debugging.

Shackney recognizes the shortcomings of ChatGPT, like instances when it gave inaccurate answers. She also acknowledges that regulations may tag the usage of ChatGPT as cheating which is why she's not simply copying and pasting the bot's responses.

On the other hand, some students have no qualms about the risks of ChatGPT, even going so far as to brag on Reddit about how they've let the AI do their homework.

Even worse is how others blatantly post a video of their usage of ChatGPT in Tiktok. Currently, the OpenAI tool has 578 million views on #chatgpt.

 

@sklumper Students are gonna abuse this so badly😂 #chatgpt#ai#artificialintelligence#comedy♬ original sound - Sklumper

 

One of the top TikTok is that of a ChatGPT user cheating on their exam and stating, "I don't know about y'all, but ima just having Chat GPT take my finals. Have fun studying."

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