There was a time when calculators were forbidden from Math classes, with Math teachers saying that you cannot depend on always having a calculator with you, of course most have one in our pockets all the time… So, now we have essay writing/research AI openly available and educators are afraid that will turn in AI-generated papers that they did not write themselves. This does complicate things, but I’ve seen students look up information in Google, copy and paste the results and try to turn that in as their work. What isn’t happening if you just copy and paste answers?

The professor in the video does a good job explaining the challenges that ChatGPT is presenting to educators and students. One cannot just ignore the possible problems and outright bans is like trying to put the genie back in the bottle. It isn’t going to work. And just like being forced over a weekend to convert all public education to “remote learning,” the solution isn’t doing whatever one can to make things the way they were before. It’s not going to happen. As the professor said, here’s an opportunity to change things up and expect more than just the regurgitation of facts but actual understanding the complexities and nuance that humans do so well when they take the time to go beyond rote facts. 

So, back to the original question, what is missed when a student just copies and pastes an answer from an Internet search? Learning, if all the student does is relay information found on the web then no real learning of what the question was prompting takes place. Now, and I’ve done this millions of times, if one does a search to see how someone else solved the problem, then one is looking at the solution (and the problem) trying to understand how the other person got there. The point of watching a tutorial on YouTube is to understand how that person came up with their solution and use that as a ground floor toward a possible better solution. But at the very least it can be a means to understand the problem better. Things like ChatGPT might be used in a similar fashion, to present a first draft expression of a solution for the student to explore and improve upon, not simply copy and paste. 

Finally, as noted in the video, this technology is at its nascent stage and will improve significantly over time. And we will need to improve as educators and students and not settle for rote facts produced without context. 

Source: PBS Newshour Classroom, Educators worry about students using artificial intelligence to cheat, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/classroom/2023/01/educators-worry-about-students-using-artificial-intelligence-to-cheat/