A Chatbot did my Homework!

A few weeks ago I did a SWOT analysis of ChatGPT and there are tremendous opportunities for teachers and students to use the tool. However the ability to receive help of an ethical or unethical kind has been democratised. No longer is it just students with overly helpful parents or those with tutors that can hand in perfect essays. 

Now everyone with Internet access might be able to get a piece of work generated quickly and efficiently with minimal effort. Let's be clear cheating is hardly new and copies of homework assignments have been around for a long time and this is just another option for students from copying friends and older siblings work to using an Essay mill company.

So what can you do to minimise the risk?

Let's start by asking ChatGPT itself! 

Q: How can I stop ChatGPT from doing my students' homework?

A: To prevent ChatGPT from doing your students' homework, you can create a specific prompt or set of guidelines for your students to follow when using the model. Additionally, you can monitor their use of the model and check their work for plagiarism. If you suspect that a student is using ChatGPT to complete their homework, you can discuss the situation with them and take appropriate action.

It has the general idea that supervision is important, but its not so helpful in this situation. So let's take a more detailed look at what can be done and how we can minimise the risk.

The first thing to do is to show that you know about ChatGPT, put the essays into ChatGPT and see what comes back. It will not be long before you are very familiar with the way it writes and although students might be able to vary the prompts by asking for different styles etc. It still comes back with its own fingerprints.  Students are less likely to try and cheat the system if they think they are likely to be caught.  Perhaps a good way to give students the hint, is to ask students what they think of an essay ChatGPT did and perhaps even mark it. Even better if its an essay it does not do so well at! 

Secondly you can lower the stakes of homework assessments, if they are seen as practices for examinations or they have enough time to do them to a high standard with multiple revisions then the use of ChatGPT could diminish.  Also consider the format of the assignment, if a student has to handwrite an assignment there is less time saved.  Videos, mind-maps and podcasts are all much less advantageous for a chatbot to do. 

Thirdly, encourage good use of sources. Yes, ChatGPT can generate sourced material, but expect students to come into class and discuss their assignment and how the sources contributed to it. If the student hasn't done the reading then it will become obvious that they don't know about what they've said. 

You could also this as an opportunity to do more flipped learning with students doing the input outside of school and the assessment inside. 

Finally, the one type of assessment that is unaffected is good-old fashioned examinations. I wish this wasn't the case, but a student writing an essay under controlled condition is the one thing that ChatGPT will NOT help them with.