How are colleges dealing with ChatGPT

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As a current college student, I think professors need to get with the times. Those professors still assigning 200+ pages of reading each week, plus discussions, plus assignments, plus quizzes. It's kind of ridiculous. Like, now that we have chatgpt, the point is that we do not need to spend hours reading 200+ pages and analyzing it in our own minds. Maybe that used to be a relevant skill, but less and less so these days. I would prefer to learn something more relevant for the future.

I mean...why read War and Peace or Hamlet anymore? You can just get the summary on ChatGPT.

Yup. Why go to college at all? You do not need to go to college to use AI.

In my field ChatGPT produces great answers about 80% of the time and generates hallucinated garbage about 20% of the time. Someone who actually learned the material can tell the difference. For those who want to master the material and not blindly put their faith in ChatGPT, there is college.

For the rest, who don't want to read, discuss, do quizzes etc., believe everything the AI tells them, there are other solid options besides college.

[Anonymous]

I can tell you almost all students use ChatGPT because the papers have all the same tell-tale nonsense phrases and canned writing style. Students may use AI in various ways and to different extent. However, I can’t do anything about their grades because I can’t fail all of the students. This is one major contribution to grade inflation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The truth is that they aren't tackling it very well. Some schools, like Ohio State, have even started requiring AI usage.

Schools don't know what they're doing, and kids only get caught using AI when they're dumb enough to leave in the ChatGPT prompts in their responses. The professors themselves oftentimes can't tell the difference between AI and strong writing.

Oh, yes, we can. Believe me, we can. I just parsed a paper a couple of days ago where the kid tried to mix individual AI sentences in with their own writing. AI writing has unnatural tone in various ways. There are lists out there of its behaviors. No student can write them all out.

Will this change in a few years? Depends on whether the consumer-facing free AI improves fast enough. It will be interesting to see what kind of gap opens up between free and paid.

[Anonymous]

My kid is in college and he is encouraged and required to use AI for certain projects. He told me yesterday he has to create an AI bot that does a certain thing (that I didn't understand) for one of his business classes. So on one hand, he is learning to use the new technology, which is clearly important.

He also seems to have a lot of group presentations and other in class assignments so I assume that is in part to make sure they don't use AI for everything.

As with all new technology, we must learn to use it or become obsolete....

[Anonymous]

My kid told me the kids use the upgraded paid chat gpt to help with math homework. Which is super hard and graded weekly. This is for a required math class at an ivy and the class is apparently super hard and poorly taught. Said chat gpt actually shows all the steps so it is easier to understand and learn. Says prof rushes through things and doesn't explain it as well. When I told my kid how using AI was disappointing to hear, he said it's a lot cheaper than $50 per hour tutors which is what the rest of the class does. I was speechless... Exams are all done in class so kids do need to learn the material. They use AI as a learning tool.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My kid told me the kids use the upgraded paid chat gpt to help with math homework. Which is super hard and graded weekly. This is for a required math class at an ivy and the class is apparently super hard and poorly taught. Said chat gpt actually shows all the steps so it is easier to understand and learn. Says prof rushes through things and doesn't explain it as well. When I told my kid how using AI was disappointing to hear, he said it's a lot cheaper than $50 per hour tutors which is what the rest of the class does. I was speechless... Exams are all done in class so kids do need to learn the material. They use AI as a learning tool.

The problem is that if they don't understand the material in the first place they have no real way to check that what the AI is feeding them is reliable and accurate.