Is Chat-evaluation the answer to ChatGPT?
Educators across the board, particularly in higher education, are being shaken to the core by ChatGPT and its relatives. The primary worry is related to assessing student work - most faculty I know are concerned that this will drastically increase “plagiarism”. My friends and colleagues are searching for tools like GPT-2 Output Detector Demo and GPTZero. Ironically, publishers of academic journals are concerned about the use of ChatGPT in academic papers. The journal Nature recently reported that four articles (that were submitted for publication) had listed ChatGPT as a co-author. It is a reflection on the human authors who listed ChatGPT as a co-author when ChatGPT cannot take responsibility for its contributions!?
Personally, I regard technologies like ChatGPT as tools that should be used as needed to become more productive. These tools will improve over time. However, this does challenge the core of many educational systems and educators - how do we assess learning when students submit “excellent work” created by these AI tools? Do we try to develop better detectors, which might be fighting a losing battle? Perhaps we need to start with redefining what we want our students to “learn” - this is a difficult #task that challenges some of the fundamental tenets of education that have been taken as granted for decades. We also need to develop new modes of assessments which measure meaningful learning. We could consider approaches like giving oral exams (verbal chat or viva voce exams) in which students will have to explain concepts, or have students solve problems on the whiteboard in real time in front of the teacher, to demonstrate their comprehension of and ability to apply subject concepts. This was how I was taught in pre-college and university. Perhaps it is time to revisit this old Vedic “guru-shishya” style where the student gets knowledge from the guru and has to demonstrate what she/he has learnt in front of the guru - verbally or visually or a combination thereof. Perhaps the historic cycle of education needs to repeat itself? ?