ChatGPT, the fastest-adopted consumer tool in human history, is able to write assignments for students in seconds allowing for “infinite plagiarism” — and is thus forcing SA universities to grapple with how they teach and test students.
The University of KwaZulu-Natal and Wits are among those that have set up a series of seminars for academics, as fears grow worldwide that the education system is being disrupted with students being able to outsource assignments and cheat more easily.
Though its academic referencing is particularly poor and often incorrect, ChatGPT makes it challenging to ensure that degrees are correctly awarded to students based on their own work and learning.
ChatGPT is a form of artificial intelligence (AI) trained on more than 570GB of text. It was designed to predict language patterns and can within seconds write poetry, essays, instructions, recipes, computer code and pass university-level medical, law and mathematics tests.
It attracted more than 100-million users in the first two months of its November launch and in its latest update last week was able to interpret a photograph of food in a fridge, and suggest recipes based on what it saw.
There is concern that tools to detect AI-generated text and catch students cheating, are unlikely to keep up.
Jacques Rousseau, who teaches critical thinking and ethics at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) School of Management Studies says “tools we have for detecting that work is AI-generated, such as ZeroGPT, are not only still in development, but are also always going to lose this arms race because AI language models will develop at a faster pace than the tools to detect academic dishonesty will”.
But professor of machine learning and robotics in the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Wits university, Benjamin Rosman, who runs the largest AI lab in Africa, is enthusiastic. “There are many discussions around the topic on campus, but I find them to be driven more by excitement and curiosity than by fear.”
He said students are definitely going to use ChatGPT or similar programmes, and universities should encourage them to do so. If students who are smart enough to get into university had not discovered ChatGPT by now, he would be worried. But teaching methods need to be adapted based on this technology, he adds.
The most extreme response to AI developments abroad is ensuring all assessments will have to be written by hand in a standardised and invigilated venue, said Gillian Mooney, dean of academic development and support at the Independent Institute of Education, part of listed group AdvTech.
However, in many cases, this is not practical. Rousseau, who teaches 1,000 students first-year classes at UCT, says, “the logistical challenges of even scheduling examinations at the end of a semester, for all students, would lead to the immediate conclusion that in-person tests, multiple times per semester, are not a viable solution”.
Some smaller courses may have in-person testing, but Rousseau’s view is that — “at least for large undergraduate classes in humanities subjects — this signals the need to de-emphasise marks”.
He says courses might require consideration of simple pass and fail grades, and a focus on learning and collaboration with classmates rather than ranking them with marks.
Hafizah Chenia, associate professor of microbiology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, speaking during a school of life sciences webinar held by the university on Friday, titled a slide, “Is ChatGPT the education apocalypse or just a reboot?” But she was pragmatic.
“We can’t ban this tool. Students are going to go into a world or careers where they need to be able to use these tools. They’re going to have colleagues in their work environment, who are not human. We need to empower them [to] use these ethically and in a way that it doesn’t impact negatively on students’ learning.”
While ChatGPT has limitations, such as only being trained on internet knowledge up until 2021 and presenting information that appears to be factual but is not — known in tech speak as “hallucinations” — it poses a question: how do students learn when they can outsource assignments more easily and how does an institute maintain the quality of a degree?
Rosman said: “Educators in many spheres have been aware that students are not always taught what they need to know.” Instead, they are taught to pass.
“These kinds of technologies really sharpen up the question of how to teach them what they need to know rather than pass,” he says. A focus on critical thinking is needed rather than facts.”
But it is clear from the various discussions that there are no easy answers on how to move forward. Rousseau says, “In short, there is no one-size solution, and for introductory courses, with large numbers, I don’t think there is any solution at all besides turning the problem on its head and accepting that students will be able to cheat in these ways, and instead encouraging a more morally virtuous approach whereby they realise that it is a good idea to learn something”.
In the webinars, academics have been encouraged to use ChatGPT to see what it can do for them and their students. Academics showed how it can be a tool to:
- Generate multiple-choice questions;
- Design course outlines, and write reference letters for students and do other simple written tasks;
- Generate essays that are incorrect factually and require corrections by students;
- Develop arguments to be debated in class; and
- Assignments can ask students to show how they used ChatGPT and what prompts for the software they used.
It will bring about a shift in educational approaches, says Rosman. But as Chenia told the webinar: “It is a language model. So it carries out a narrowly defined set of related tasks. This is completely different from generalised AI, which is what most people fear is going to demonstrate intelligent behaviour across a wide range of cognitive skills. ChatGPT fills a niche.
“It’s not that scary machine that is now going to take over the world, even though some of us in higher education, are really concerned about it.”
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