To teach in the time of ChatGPT is to know pain
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I work in academic technology at a college and I'm currently both doing focus groups with students on AI use as well as designing a series of summer workshops for faculty on AI in the classroom.
The most salient comment I've heard in the past year was from a frustrated student who works hard on papers only to see other students get a higher grade when they spend 10 minutes with ChatGPT because "ChatGPT gives the answers faculty want"
This reveals a serious disconnect between what faculty want (student learning) and how they assess that. We default to grading term papers because those were reasonable instruments to see student capabilities- we don't actually care about the term papers themselves. (We're more than happy to throw then in the trash after a long weekend if grading). We just want to know if a student actually understands what we've been teaching
This is not a new problem- students have always been able to bypass writing papers by getting other (paid) people to write them -LLMs just make that easier and cheaper. The answer isn't to give up or to add some ridiculous amount of anti cheating tech, it's to change how we assess learning. Does that mean in-class handwritten assignments in a blue book? Maybe, if that's appropriate. Oral exams? Sure. But get more creative- I've used serious role playing games where students reenact historical events like the trials of Galileo and interactive simulations to let them play around with how an industry changes over time. One of my guys runs our innovation lab (makerspace) and he's amazing at figuring out ways to get hands on activities mapped to learning goals.
Is reworking your entire syllabus to deal with AI going to be a pain? Yes. Is it going to take more time? Probably. But it's not impossible to figure out new ways to assess learning- and who knows, they might be a lot more interesting than grading yet another stack of mediocre term papers
The most salient comment I've heard in the past year was from a frustrated student who works hard on papers only to see other students get a higher grade when they spend 10 minutes with ChatGPT because "ChatGPT gives the answers faculty want"
This reveals a serious disconnect between what faculty want (student learning) and how they assess that. We default to grading term papers because those were reasonable instruments to see student capabilities- we don't actually care about the term papers themselves. (We're more than happy to throw then in the trash after a long weekend if grading). We just want to know if a student actually understands what we've been teaching
This is not a new problem- students have always been able to bypass writing papers by getting other (paid) people to write them -LLMs just make that easier and cheaper. The answer isn't to give up or to add some ridiculous amount of anti cheating tech, it's to change how we assess learning. Does that mean in-class handwritten assignments in a blue book? Maybe, if that's appropriate. Oral exams? Sure. But get more creative- I've used serious role playing games where students reenact historical events like the trials of Galileo and interactive simulations to let them play around with how an industry changes over time. One of my guys runs our innovation lab (makerspace) and he's amazing at figuring out ways to get hands on activities mapped to learning goals.
Is reworking your entire syllabus to deal with AI going to be a pain? Yes. Is it going to take more time? Probably. But it's not impossible to figure out new ways to assess learning- and who knows, they might be a lot more interesting than grading yet another stack of mediocre term papers
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