As School Starts, Teachers Struggle With New Kid in the Classroom: ChatGPT

Cody Ashley, a history teacher from Cristovall Middle School and High School in Cristovall, Texas, didn’t have to worry about ChatGPT last school year. His administration banned its use on the school’s Wi-Fi network, and his seventh graders were maybe a little too young to know much about the tool. 

This year, he’s teaching high school and said he won’t be surprised if he finds out his students are using ChatGPT or another, similar artificial intelligence tool. He’s now in the process of familiarizing himself with ChatGPT and figuring out the best way to incorporate it into his teaching.

“I can understand where they are coming from,” he said. “It’s a new tool and it’s out there. Students are going to use it, so we have to find a way to use it in a responsible way.”

ChatGPT's debut last November flummoxed many schools. Students tapped into its uncanny ability to generate essays and finish assignments with just a few prompts as administrators scrambled to prevent misuse.

Now, as students head back to class for a new school year, educators still have no easy answer about the role of these powerful text-generating tools in the classroom.

Just as educators start tackling ChatGPT's implications, its beefed-up version released in March, GPT-4, raises the stakes. The chatbot got the highest possible grade on an AP Biology exam and scored 1410 out of 1600 points on the SAT, according to OpenAI.

GPT-4 has even passed the bar exam and is within “passing range” for part of the U.S. medical licensing examination. It’s no wonder that a survey found that 44 percent of teens are "likely" to use AI to do their schoolwork instead of doing it themselves this year. 

Faced with such prospects, schools have scrambled to set boundaries. New York City’s Department of Education banned—and then changed course and unbanned—ChatGPT on school devices and networks.

Other school systems like the Seattle Public Schools and Los Angeles Unified School District have maintained bans since December.

Sciences Po, one of France's top universities, and RV University in Bangalore, India, have also banned the use of ChatGPT, but other universities have been trying to find a balance between the use of such technologies and having students do their own work. 

Columbia Business School in New York offers professors language they can assert into a syllabus about acceptable ways to use the tech in an effort to make it clear to students what would be considered cheating. It also offers resources for professors on how to implement AI use for assignments and in the classroom in ways that benefit students, according to Dan Wang, an associate professor at Columbia’s Business School.

“We are not saying ChatGPT is banned,” Wang said. “But creating a policy that has accountability around the use of generative AI tools. What this represents is an opportunity to develop new innovations in learning.”

After last fall's introduction, ChatGPT reached 100 million users in under two months, many of them students. When usage dipped almost 10 percent from May to June, commentators pointed out it was likely due to students on summer break, and they expected it to come roaring back in the new school year.

Because of worries about cheating, ChatGPT creator OpenAI and other startups deployed an AI hall monitor to catch rule-breaking uses of chatbots. But OpenAI shut down its AI detector service after it showed a “low rate of accuracy, and researchers have shown that other paid services also don’t work. One recent Stanford study found that several AI detectors “​​exhibit significant bias against non-native English authors.”

Some teachers have fought back by asking questions that most AI tools would struggle to answer correctly, such as bringing up recent events not in the training data the artificial intelligence has seen.

Other professors require students to show editing history and to prove their thought processes, and students worried about being falsely accused of cheating are screen recording their work. Teachers have also gone back to paper and pen.

For their part, many educators are immersing themselves in the new tech so they know what they are dealing with. Training and conferences held this summer were well-attended and sometimes over-booked, and an online "AI 101 for Teachers" course was created by a partnership of educational companies.

With the technology enterring the workplace, recent college graduates are already putting “prompt engineer” on their resumes, and companies are hiring for ChatGPT-savvy employees with eye-raising salaries.

Wang argues that it would be a disservice to students to discourage them from learning how to use the technology.

“There is pressure on education systems to be responsible for teaching students something expected in the workplace,” he said. “So it would seem counterproductive to 100 percent ban it.”