Manthan GattaniMath teacher with 11 Years of teaching experience, Manthan has taught 10,000+ students across multiple geographies.
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ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot developed by OpenAI that can answer questions, provide information, and even write essays on a wide range of topics. However, its use by students can potentially lead to cheating and unfair advantages in exams and assignments. To protect the integrity of education, it is important to understand and detect the use of ChatGPT by students.
Welcome to our free weekly series on technology and classroom management techniques. This week we will break down what ChatGPT is and discuss some ways you can detect its use by your students. If you're interested in receiving more tips and updates like this on a regular basis, please subscribe by clicking the button at end of this page.
Cheating has never been easier!
For many years, plagiarism has been a worry for teachers and educational communities.
However, until last year, students could use apps like Photomath or Google by simply pointing their phone's camera at a problem, be it in a textbook, worksheet, or even handwritten, and viola! Not only will it instantly show you the solution, but it will even show you the step by step work, providing an illusion of understanding and covering up cheating from the teacher.
But students are now getting another arrow in their quiver - ChatGPT. If you have been active on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Reddit or any social media platform, chances are you have already heard/seen ChatGPT. If not, I would highly encourage you to try it from their website.
ChatGPT is revolutionary, its OpenAI’s new artificially intelligent chatbot that can answer questions on a wide range of topics, including history, science, mathematics, and even write essays on complex topics
In a recent research paper published, ChatGPT passed a US law school exam. The impact has been so wide that Sciences Po, one of France's top universities, has banned the use of ChatGPT, to prevent fraud and plagiarism.
Obviously, we all know that cheating is bad. Students do not learn the concept if they’re cheating, and then they will fail the test! They also struggle in subsequent classes, as it gets progressively more difficult. So in today’s newsletter, I want to shift the focus from ethical coaching advice to more practical tips. Here are my top three tips for you to protect academic integrity in your class.
Hack 1 - Use a ChatGPT detector
Earlier today Open AI, the same company that created ChatGPT also launched a classifier trained to distinguish between AI-written and human-written text.
The company’s blog says
While it is impossible to reliably detect all AI-written text, we believe good classifiers can inform mitigations for false claims that AI-generated text was written by a human: for example, running automated misinformation campaigns, using AI tools for academic dishonesty, and positioning an AI chatbot as a human. - Open AI Blog
But like everything, there is a catch. AI-generated text can be edited easily to evade the classifier, which means the classifier isn't always accurate. it can mislabel both AI-generated and human-written text.
On the evaluations on a “challenge set” of English texts, the classifier correctly identified only 26% of AI-written text (true positives) as “likely AI-written,” while incorrectly labelling the human-written text as AI-written 9% of the time (false positives). The classifier’s reliability typically improves as the length of the input text increases; hence, there is a 1000-character minimum limit on the classifier today, which is approximately 150 - 250 words.
Regardless, we think this is a step in the right direction, especially for education. As far as we understand Artificial Intelligence, its quality improves over time, so while the accuracy might look low now, chances are this can improve significantly.
And while that happens there are other two more tricks you can use to catch cheating in your class.
Hack 2 - Get editor access to their Google Doc
As teachers, we have a natural “Sherlock eye”.
Assuming you use Google Docs, you can ask your students to always give you the editor access to their documents. This way, you can keep an eye on the document's revision history and see how the submission was created and edited over time.
If you suspect that the final submission is beyond the student's capability, you can check the history and see if they completed the work in a few minutes or if a large portion of the text appeared suddenly in a short period of time. This would indicate that the student possibly made it all up the night before the deadline and did not actually put in the time and effort to learn the material.
Here’s a video that can help you learn how to see a document’s history. Trust me, this one of the most reliable ways, and is very hard to get around.
Hack 3 - Grade their in-class work only
Treat homework as practice and in-class work as the main game. Just like sports teams don't grade practice but they know it’s vital for their performance in the game.
So grade their in class work only.
Put emphasis on tests taken in secure environments, such as the classroom or through secure software (we have a software suggestion 😉). If you make the in class quizzes/tests worth more than ~40% of the grade there should be sufficient motivation for students to care about their grade to actually try to learn the material covered.
Thats all for today!
We would love to hear your feedback and experiences on these strategies. Please feel free to share with us your thoughts, comments and any other strategies that have worked for you by replying to this email. We believe that together we can learn from each other and create better learning environments for our students.
Written by
Manthan Gattani
Math teacher with 11 Years of teaching experience, Manthan has taught 10,000+ students across multiple geographies.
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