In some cases, the cheating is obvious, says Main, the writing professor, who has had students turn in assignments that were clearly cut-and-paste jobs. “I had answers come in that said, ‘I am just an AI language model, I don’t have an opinion on that,’” he said.
In his first-year required writing class last semester, Main logged 57 academic integrity issues, an explosion of academic dishonesty compared to about eight cases in each of the two prior semesters. AI cheating accounted for about half of them.
This fall, Main and colleagues are overhauling the school’s required freshman writing course. Writing assignments will be more personalised to encourage students to write about their own experiences, opinions and perspectives. All assignments and the course syllabi will have strict rules forbidding the use of artificial intelligence.
College administrators have been encouraging instructors to make the ground rules clear.
Many institutions are leaving the decision to use chatbots or not in the classroom to instructors, said Hiroano Okahana, the head of the Education Futures Lab at the American Council on Education.
At Michigan State University, faculty are being given “a small library of statements” to choose from and modify as they see fit on syllabi, said Bill Hart-Davidson, associate dean in MSU’s College of Arts and Letters who is leading AI workshops for faculty to help shape new assignments and policy.
“Asking students questions like, ‘Tell me in three sentences what is the Krebs cycle in chemistry?’ That’s not going to work anymore, because ChatGPT will spit out a perfectly fine answer to that question,” said Hart-Davidson, who suggests asking questions differently. For example, give a description that has errors and ask students to point them out.
Evidence is piling up that chatbots have changed study habits and how students seek information.
Chegg, an online company that offers homework help and has been cited in numerous cheating cases, said in May its shares had tumbled nearly 50 per cent in the first quarter of 2023 because of a spike in student usage of ChatGPT, according to Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig. He said students who normally pay for Chegg’s service were now using the AI platform for free.
At Temple this spring, the use of research tools like library databases declined notably following the emergence of chatbots, said Joe Lucia, the university’s dean of libraries.
“It seemed like students were seeing this as a quick way of finding information that didn’t require the effort or time that it takes to go to a dedicated resource and work with it,” he said.
Source: CNA
