It's just lowering the bar for cheating a little bit from buying essays / paying someone else to do it.
Honestly I don't think writing essays for a course is a good measure of understanding the material. It's mostly an exercises in regurgitation.
Honestly I don't think writing essays for a course is a good measure of understanding the material. It's mostly an exercises in regurgitation.
By offloading this to a machine the students are undercutting themselves more than anything else. They'll be less effective communicators and less capable of disagreeing with ideas and concepts the face in the real world
An essay that is simply a description of the source material, or a listing of pros and cons with no actual thesis, is a totally different endeavor, and one that has much less value as method of instruction or assessment.
Then again I guess the same argument can be made for maths but no one complains that we're teaching to memorize and repeat the same steps of various proofs one learns in 1st year.
The rule is you have to turn in your own, original work. You provided a prompt, and a piece of software turned it into an essay.
Is this inherently different from using the predictive keyboard on iOS, or using Grammerly to write clearer sentences? Where is the cut off point where the computer did too much work on its own?
Likewise using a 4 function calculator in an arithmetic class is cheating but in an algebra class it's not.
Regardless, IMO this is where the discussion becomes too hypothetical:
• Right now, AIs are bad at writing.
• If a student is able to masterfully craft a prompt which causes today's bad AIs to produce good writing, that student is talented, and I suspect they actually did a significant amount of work.
• If today's bad AIs are able to produce assignments which receive passing grades with minimal prompting, something is wrong with the assignment. Teachers should assign work that isn't so rote a computer can do it.
• If, in the future, AIs are able to write strong, well-reasoned essays about novel concepts, students won't need to learn how to write. They may not need to learn much of anything†, because I don't think there will be much space left for humans in the workforce.
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† "Need" is a key word here; I do believe in learning for its own sake, and apparently we'll have lots of time on our hands. Cool story btw, learning how to develop film in a dark room is lots of fun, would recommend.
It's a really good question, but also a really silly question that no one should have to guess about. Teachers should be simply be providing explicit policies one way or the other.
I had "anything goes" assignments and "strict" assignments. For the former I didn't care. For the latter I could either tell whp if you were cheating, or else proctored the assignment.
Math is a good leader here. Sometimes you allow certain tools. Sometimes you don't. The set of tools allowed tends to increase as courses get more difficult and assignments get larger. It really just depends on what is being evaluated.