ChatGPT in the Classroom

If your response to the ChatGPT challenge is not yet at the top of your strategic planning agenda, then it may be time to rethink your priorities...

Much has been written about ChatGPT and it’s potential impact on knowledge industries and content creation. I know personally a number of software developers who are using ChatGPT on a daily basis to help make their coding more efficient. At the same time there are the usual doomsayers predicting that ChatGPT will take over the world or decimate jobs of knowledge-workers worldwide.

But what about the education sector?

Anyone who has undertaken more than a cursory review of this latest iteration of artificial intelligence will realise its potential to have a profound impact on learning and assessment.

On the plus side, ChatGPT may signal the demise of the contract cheating industry - at least in countries where the platform is freely or cheaply available to students. After all, what rational student would pay for another person to complete their assessments when an artificial intelligence bot can do a better job, faster and cheaper. Of course, in this respect, we are merely shifting the problem away from a sleazy and unethical industry toward an amoral and unaccountable machine. Still, no decent academic will shed a tear for the end of paid cheats and plagiarists.

On the negative side, ChatGPT represents a major threat to our ability to assess whether work submitted by a student is authentically their own. To test the ability of ChatGPT to formulate passable answers I have submitted questions from our current assessments and been genuinely surprised by the high quality of responses. Slightly changing the wording of the question, or entering into a “conversation” with the bot can yield a substantially different but still valid answer. It is entirely conceivable that all the members of a class could produce apparently original responses by simply reformatting the question in their own words. This poses a significant challenge to plagiarism-detection software because ChatGPT thinks like a real person and answers in plain natural language. It does not simply return the same few static web pages that students commonly copy and paste into their submissions after Googling a topic.

Some might think the solution lies in a return to fully proctored exams or assessments. But the sheer cost of applying this in a sector which has shifted substantially online, not to mention the logistical issues and chronic staff shortages, makes such a solution wholly impractical.

No doubt we will find a solution to these questions in time , and hopefully even go beyond that to find ways of incorporating AI into the learning process to meaningfully boost student outcomes But such discovery will not come easy or quickly and considerable research and innovation may be required.

If your response to the ChatGPT challenge is not yet at the top of your strategic planning agenda, then it may be time to rethink your priorities. I would imagine that your students are already all-over this technology so you may already be behind the 8-ball.

John Burgess

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