With the media and educator spouting about A.I. and ChatGPT, are you going to be able to use it to write your papers in the near future? Students are already “experimenting” with that function, which is why schools are so concerned. The student reporter says that at its current level, ChatGPT has nice vocabulary but isn’t going to get you an “A.” This advance in technology is going to require schools and educators to rethink how we assess learning. How do you think schools should deal with this situation?

This is an interesting time in education and the advance of computer intelligence/large language models. Up until now the big change in technology that had some bearing on education was access to information. Prior to the 1990s and the push to bring the Information Super-Highway to schools (or broadband to homes), you had to go to the library to do research, and libraries for the most part were the domain of institutions of learning. That shift alone should have shook up education to develop better means to assess learning than multiple-choice/standardized testing. But no, we’re still stuck thinking that information and the ability to spit out information on command is intelligence/learning. Oops. 

And now that computers are capable of spitting out passable prose how do we make sure that students aren’t just copying and pasting their answers? Well, for those who might have been paying attention, that boat left its shores decades ago when all human information became available with just a simple Google search. So, no, we are nowhere near actual general purpose self-aware A.I., but these platforms are doing a good enough simulation that institutions of learning need to buckle down and wake up to the challenge that the means of documenting learning progress from even 50-years ago are not going to pass. All of this is just one sliver of evidence of a much larger problem with institutional education fighting to maintain the “status quo.” Why? Ugh. Never mind. I’m leaving teaching in a couple weeks and I did everything I could. Good luck y’all. I did everything that I could. 

Source: PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs: Student Take on ChatGPT, https://youtu.be/9z8LcK25oqI