There’s no way for teachers to figure out if students are using ChatGPT to cheat, OpenAI says in new back-to-school guide::AI detectors used by educators to detect use of ChatGPT don’t work, says OpenAI.
There’s no way for teachers to figure out if students are using ChatGPT to cheat, OpenAI says in new back-to-school guide::AI detectors used by educators to detect use of ChatGPT don’t work, says OpenAI.
My wife teaches at a university. The title is partly bullshit:
For most teachers it couldn’t be more obvious who used ChatGPT in an assignment and who didn’t.
The problem, in most instances, isn’t the “figuring out” part, but the “reasonably proving” part.
And that’s the most frustrating part: you know an assignment was AI-written, there are no tools to prove it and the university gives its staff virtually no guidance or assistance on the subject matter, so you’re almost powerless.
Switch to oral exam and you’ll know fairly quickly who is actually learning the material.
Biggest reason for written exams is bulk processing.
There are many better ways to show competency, ask any engineering or medical school, but few as cheap.
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To add on to the detection issues, international students, students on the spectrum, students with learning disability, … can all be subject to being flagged as “AI generated” by AI detectors. Teachers/professors who have gut feelings should (1) re-consider what biases they have in expected writing styles, and (2), like u/mind says, check in with the students.
I’ve had great success in pasting my writing in to help it write in my “voice”
My coven-mate was called in by her college dean, accusing her of faking or plagiarizing her mid-term thesis. (I totally forget what the subject was. This was late 1980s. She wanted to work in national intelligence.)
But the thing is, she could expain every part of her rabbit-hole deep dive (which was a trip to several libraries and locating books themselves rather than tracking leads through the internet.) It was all fresh in her head, and to the shock and awe of her dean and instructor (delight? horror?) it was clear she was just a determined genius doing post-grad quality work because she pushed herself that hard. And yes, she was out of their league and could probably write the thesis again if that was necessary.
In our fucked up society, the US has little respect for teachers or even education so I don’t expect anything real to happen, but this would be grounds to reduce classroom size by increasing faculty size so that each teacher is familiar with their fifteen students, their capabilities and ambitions and challenges at home. That way when a kid turns in an AI essay but then can’t expain what the essay says, the teacher can use it as a teachable moment: point out that AI is a springboard, a place to start as a foundation for a report, but it’s still important for the student to make it their own, and make sure it comes to conclusions they agree with.