September 26th, 2024

Teacher caught students using ChatGPT on their first assignment. Debate ensues

Professor Megan Fritts reported students using ChatGPT for assignments, igniting debate on AI's impact on education, critical thinking, and reading skills, with educators divided on its classroom integration.

Read original articleLink Icon
Teacher caught students using ChatGPT on their first assignment. Debate ensues

Professor Megan Fritts from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock reported that several students in her ethics and technology class used ChatGPT to complete their introductory assignment. This incident sparked a debate on social media regarding the implications of AI in education. Fritts expressed surprise that students felt compelled to use AI for what she considered a simple task, highlighting concerns about the erosion of critical thinking skills. While some educators defend AI as a tool similar to calculators, Fritts argues that this comparison is flawed, particularly in the humanities, where the goal is to foster independent thought rather than produce a specific output. She noted that students have expressed a decline in their reading abilities and attention spans, attributing this to technology addiction. Fritts acknowledged the need for educators to teach responsible AI use but criticized the notion that the burden of addressing cheating should fall solely on them. Many educators are divided on the issue, with some embracing AI in the classroom while others revert to traditional methods to combat its use. The ongoing debate reflects broader concerns about the impact of technology on education and student engagement.

- Professor Megan Fritts reported students using ChatGPT for an introductory assignment.

- The incident has sparked a debate on AI's role in education and its impact on critical thinking.

- Fritts argues that AI use undermines the goals of humanities education.

- Students have noted a decline in reading skills and attention spans due to technology.

- Educators are divided on how to integrate AI into the classroom effectively.

Link Icon 20 comments
By @elashri - 2 months
This comment reflects my personal opinion and experience [please take it with open mind]

I really hate these type of questions. The open ended questions that is about myself is not something useful. Students will usually do it because they have and will come up with anything (even before LLM). I understand the point that part of that is for students to get to know each other and professor know more about their expectations.

I was once a grader for Astronomy class in the summer for the public (anyone could take it). Part of the assessment was that in each assignment students will ask one question and each student should answer at least one other question. I really questioned my relation with the world grading those questions. Astrology was the common topic. Random questions from all about anything you could come up related to Astronomy (or you think it is related). I no longer teach or grade and my experience were pre-ChatGPT era. ChatGPT will change education and educators have to adapt.

They were forced to do it and they just did it for the grade. The purpose was to encourage communication and collaboration but in my experience this rarely work. People will just put bare minimum to just do this. LLM makes this too easy and it will be too tempting to use it. Some people did good job both asking and answering. But many were just not interested and had to do it anyway.

Scientists collaborate out of necessity and because most of the them have genuine interest in this field. They get trained during their grad school and usually they still don't do well communicating and collaborating with each other. They are human after all.

For the case we have in hand I can see a student tempted to write poor version on answer to this question without having to worry about grammar, typos..etc and will ask LLM to write in an academic style. How would they practice writing academic writing and express their thoughts properly? Probably never but this is them tricking themselves.

Another problem which makes this case unique is that this course is about ethics. So lets set plagiarism and university rules aside. A discussion on using LLMs would be better start for a class about ethics and technology.

By @MobiusHorizons - 2 months
There is an inevitability to the tone of this article that I find really depressing (probably because I tend to feel the same way). That The ability of students to think deeply and learn well has been severely diminished over the last decade. That AI use is not even a cause so much as a possible means of escape from the problem. On the one hand this feels true to me given my own experience, but on the other hand I know I still manage to learn and undertake complex tasks, so why should "kids these days" be doomed?

How are you all feeling your attention span change? Are you able to sit and think or read long passages without distracting yourself? Were you ever able to do this? If you find yourself struggling, how do you manage?

I find myself reaching for audiobooks much more frequently these days. Longer tasks are still possible if I find sufficient motivation. Curiosity is not always enough. I have to craft specific goals for myself in order to maintain motivation, but this takes me quite far in my self-study.

By @preommr - 2 months
This is in no small-part due to how broken the system is in providing value to the students.

Why do the teachers care? Let the students not learn and suffer from it.

The only reason they pull stunts like this is because it actually doesn't have as much of an impact.

Why do employers stop asking about grades, and instead focus on actual experience? Because all things equal, that's what matters more. So can we blame students for trying speedrun these barriers to get to what's actually important? And not what they're told is important by educators who have an obvious bias, but what they can see in the reality of the job market.

By @pseudo_meta - 2 months
The fact that it's a class on ethics and technology is quite ironic.
By @lolinder - 2 months
By @returnInfinity - 2 months
Flip the script, ask the students to record videos instead and then use AI to extract text out of the videos.
By @adamcharnock - 2 months
I found the linked Reddit thread to be particularly interesting (educators discussing use of ChatGPT by students, 1y ago):

https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/17v6478/chatgpt...

By @adityamwagh - 2 months
This is just sad.
By @mediumsmart - 2 months
Part of the foundation a post knowledge storytelling society can stand on.
By @qubitcoder - 2 months
I'm part of a local physics meetup where AI is often a topic of conversation. One member is a well-regarded high school physics teacher (his students end up at MIT, Georgia Tech, etc., and some go on to get physics PhDs).

He shared that some teachers now require AI/LLMs for homework assignments, such as writing essays. The actual assignment is to critique the output of the LLM.

As a millennial, even our middle school classes taught information literacy in various forms in the "computer lab". And that was the nascent days of the web.

AI is a tool, not unlike a calculator or Wikipedia. They were both controversial and even forbidden at times. Students adapted. So did education.

By @AStonesThrow - 2 months
A couple of years ago, one of the GE English courses I took was 100% oriented toward producing exactly one research paper.

The class, therefore, involved laying the foundations, doing the research, constructing footnotes and a bibliography, producing a couple of drafts, and finally submitting a finished work.

And so the instructor was there to shepherd us the entire way through the whole process, with oversight and feedback at every step. This was not simply, "OK you took a class on <X> and it's time to spew out a paper of <N> pages on it." This was learning how to correctly do a research paper from start to finish.

It was fantastic because it really made cheating stupid. Whether you were going to purchase a paper online, or have an LLM write it, or pay a friend to do your work, every cheating method was profoundly irrelevant and useless in the face of this process. At the end, either you've learned something about writing a good college paper, or you haven't.

I took other classes that taught about rhetoric, evaluation of sources, and extra credit was to read and analyze a novel. The instructors were top-notch and highly credentialed, at the top of their game. Especially for community college where I was taking on a FAFSA grant, I thought that the whole process was absolutely rigorous, educational, and extremely edifying even at my advanced age.

By @blitzar - 2 months
I imagine the output was something like this...

>> Hi I'm ChatGPT and I can't take this class because I am a chat bot.

The smart ones swapped their name in when they copy and pasted the answer and went undetected.

By @cosmotic - 2 months
"say what you're hoping to get out of this class" is an invitation for bullshit, something LLMs are good at and at least this human (me) is bad at. This makes a lot of sense. Who's taking that class for a reason other than "it fulfills the required credit"? I'm sure it's not enough to expect a wide range of creative responses the instructor seems to have been expecting.
By @raister - 2 months
If you have the time and the attention span: "ChatGPT is bullshit"

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5

(although they concluded it's "soft" bullshit, as it doesn't aim to 'harm')

By @anshumankmr - 2 months
Do folks think ChatGPT soon will become a paid only platform or heavily curtail the free tier like claude.ai is to make Open AI profitable? Just food for thought.

It really has become a defacto flag bearer for all LLMs in the market, and I don't know a single person who doesn't use save for my father who is from the boomer generation.

By @treme - 2 months
tbh even functional role of a teacher is about to be upend with AI. All I know is I rather my children be taught something that will be useful with assumption that everyone will have access to have a tool like chatgpt at home/work.
By @timonoko - 2 months
I asked Gemini to add some grammar error that 13-year old might make. Worked very well, it added some teen-typical inflection errors.

English is of course different thing, because there is no actual grammar, it is just word salad and everything goes.

By @khafra - 2 months
> They are also using it to word the questions they ask in class

This seems like a straightforward upgrade of the school experience. There truly are dumb questions; many of them get asked in class because speaking to a rubber duck first would be "disruptive." If you're going to take the whole class's attention down a tangent, why is it bad to get a smart generalist's opinion on the optimal shape for that tangent, first?