Cheating on Essays in Higher Education through ChatGPT Alarms Academia
December 28, 2022
IBL News | New York
An assistant professor at South Carolina’s Furman University sounded the alarm on plagiarism and academic dishonesty after they caugth a student using Open AI’s ChatGPT to write an essay for his philosophy class.
The disruptive, three weeks-old technology ChatGPT seems to be prompting cheating at scale in Academia.
Assistant philosophy professor Darren Hick said to The New York Post, “Academia did not see this coming. So weâre sort of blindsided by it.”
“As soon as I reported this on Facebook, my academic friends said, âYeah, I caught one too.”
Hick explained this case this way:
“The student used ChatGPT, an advanced chatbot that produces human-like responses to user-generated prompts. Such prompts might range from âExplain the Krebs cycleâ to (as in my case) âWrite 500 words on Hume and the paradox of horror.”
“For freshman-level classes, this is a game-changer.”
For now, and while ChatGPT gets better, one of the solutions to combat cheating is GPT-2 Output Detector. It detects if the text has been produced using GPT technology and determines if it’s fake. However, it cannot point to any source on the Internet since it uses neural networks to produce its answers.
“Administrations are going to have to develop standards for dealing with these kinds of cases, and theyâre going to have to do it fast.”
“In the future, I expect Iâm going to institute a policy stating that if I believe material submitted by a student was produced by A.I., I will throw it out and give the student an impromptu oral exam on the same material. Until my school develops some standard for dealing with this sort of thing, itâs the only path I can think of.”
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