Since the release of ChatGPT a little more than six months ago, students have quickly figured out how to get the free AI chatbot to do their homework for them. That has sparked a burst of activity by teachers at schools and colleges to change their assignments to make them harder to game with this new tech — and hopefully more human in the process.
But pulling off these “assignment makeovers,” as some instructors are calling them, turns out to be challenging, and what works differs significantly depending on the subject matter and type of assignment.
EdSurge talked with professors in a variety of disciplines to dig into what they’re trying as they teach summer classes or prepare for the fall. The race to outsmart artificial intelligence is on as educators try to prevent the coming semester from devolving into, as one professor put it, a “homework apocalypse.”
A large number of K-12 teachers and college professors have decided to simply ban the use of ChatGPT and other new AI chatbots when completing assignments. Some of those instructors are using tools that attempt to detect text written by bots, such as GPTZero and a new tool by Turnitin. But even the makers of those detection tools admit they don’t always work, and they can even falsely accuse human-written assignments as being generated by AI. And some schools have attempted to block AI chatbots from their school networks and devices, but experts say that doing so is essentially impossible, since students can easily access the tech from their smartphones, or through the many services that have integrated AI but that aren’t on lists of banned tools.
But plenty of educators are game to try working with AI rather than simply wish it didn’t exist. A recent survey of 1,000 K-12 teachers found that 61 percent predicted that ChatGPT will have “legitimate educational uses that we cannot ignore.”
Adding Authenticity
Some teaching experts see AI as a spark to motivate instructors to make assignments more interesting and more “authentic,” as Bonni Stachowiak, dean of teaching and learning at Vanguard University of Southern California, argued on a recent EdSurge Podcast.
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