I can imagine somebody knowing the answer being able to properly verify the output. But a student which is supposed to learn something form that homework? We're missing the entire point of homework here.
With this view, I think chatGPT is less of a novel UX shift than an accelerant on an existing one.
I think it proves the age old belief that as technology reaches maturity it loses its fancy monikers and we will probably just look at this as “very good, very specific, google” one day
* Understanding the quality of sources
* Understanding the different between primary and secondary sources.
* Establishing chains of evidence and tracing them through large datasets.
* Integrating information from different sources and using correlation to establish validity.
Basically, it would be a crash course in how to do research, and the best possible preparation for living in a world where we drown in uncertain information and still have to make the best choices that we can.
For bonus points, at the end of the process they would have a better understanding of the subject matter than somebody who had only read about it.
That said, adult me could probably use ChatGPT to stitch together a 1000 word high school paper pretty easily (and probably evade plagiarism/LLM detectors). But, as you say, I could probably get a lot of the way there by other means as well and putting words on the page is mostly not the hard part anyway.
But it seems kind of dubious to begin with, I'm not sure why LLM output would be so easily detected.
If you play with it a bit, there are definitely patterns.
Here's one I did over the weekend: 99.98% fake.
The Battle of Agincourt was a significant event in English and French history, as it was a major victory for the English army against the French during the Hundred Years' War. The battle took place on October 25, 1415, near the town of Agincourt in northern France.
The English army, led by King Henry V, was vastly outnumbered by the French forces, which were estimated to be around 30,000 soldiers compared to the English army of just 6,000. Despite the odds, the English were able to emerge victorious thanks to their superior tactics and weaponry.
The English army was composed of mostly longbowmen, who were able to shoot arrows with great accuracy and power. The French, on the other hand, relied heavily on heavily-armored knights, who were less effective in the muddy and wet conditions of the battlefield. The English were also able to take advantage of the narrow front of the battlefield, which allowed them to focus their firepower and overwhelm the French forces.
Whereas the first couple paragraphs from a book I'm working on came out 0.02% fake.
Public schools will struggle to teach kids anything, and to distinguish between A grades that were earned and those achieved largely through cheating, while parents will resist efforts to switch to grading schemes that can't be trivially gamed (just try switching to only-in-person-tests-count grading and witness the rage that follows when Little Johnny's grades plummet). Kids who lean on the motivation from graded homework to get themselves to do the work (and so, learn the material) will struggle, as well, even if that is allowed to happen.
This will enhance the reputations of schools that can buck the trend, applying more resources (mostly more teachers, for smaller class sizes, to make it easier to keep an eye on everything and really gauge & guide learning progress for each student) and an "if you don't like it, fuck off to somewhere else" attitude to parent complaints about grading practices. Which means, elite private schools will benefit.
I expect that a 4.0 from a public school will mean almost nothing, while at the same time coming in under a 4.0 will look terrible ("everyone cheats and you still couldn't get a 4.0? How dumb are you!?") which will just worsen the cheating problem.
Maybe parents will surprise me and not throw shit-fits over solutions to this, and public schools will be able to implement them. But I doubt it.
The student still had access to primary sources, textbooks, google and AI answers.
In general I am a fan of homework which forces critical thinking. Rephrasing someone elses work is a far less valuable skill than the critical thinking which is demanded for that type of work. Unrelated of any AI, students should learn how to read a text and be able to investigate its contents.
They have to learn to verify it. I think you missed point of OPs idea.