A student goes home bombarded with assignments due the next day, so he quickly starts to brainstorm topics for his English essay but comes up empty. He then goes on ChatGPT to give him some ideas for topics he could use and ends up writing a great essay on his own, but he gets a zero on the assignment for using AI to brainstorm.
Did he cheat?
Deciding when a student has crossed into cheating with AI is an uphill battle because we can all agree that students shouldn’t be able to copy and paste work that ChatGPT did entirely for them, but the majority of school systems don’t know where to draw the line.
Bari Rabine, the Wright House Principal, explained how on the district side, they developed a committee a few years ago that works on creating a vision and a policy for Pre-K-12.
One of the most significant breakthroughs for this committee, Rabine stated, was that,“they were testing a couple different sites and choosing which AI tool we might use.”
Rabine explained how “one of the things that we’ve done going into this school year is [decide] that Magic School AI is kind of our chosen platform.”
History teacher, Jeremy Timperanza shared how he read a book over the summer about using AI in the classroom so that he could prepare for what he would be up against during the school year.
“Part of my logic going into this year was, I don’t even really feel that confident in what GPT stands for,” Timperanza said. He also shared that one of his main goals with his students was figuring out how they could use AI as more of a partner in learning, as opposed to something more in the plagiarism category.
Mr. Timperanza is not the only person who wants to learn more about AI, but it is hard to learn about something that keeps growing and changing. According to ITIF.com, ChatGPT reached 100 million users worldwide in just two months. Relatively speaking, it took Instagram 2.5 years and TikTok nine months to reach this many users.
With all this rapid growth Rabine did affirm that ChatGPT and other forms of AI can complicate things in the classroom. Rabine said,“[if, for example, I] were teaching a computer coding class– I don’t want to teach students in that class how to use AI to do their coding…because so much of coding is learning how to think like a coder.”
And that’s the million dollar question in the education world right now: how do educators keep students thinking critically when students have the answers right at their fingertips? Educators all agree that it is vital for students to be able to think for themselves.
However, tackling AI in the classroom is a challenge, and according to Project Tomorrow’s speak up report, “Only 13% of teachers feel confident in their ability to use AI tools…and more than half say they haven’t discussed AI with their students at all.”
If more teachers were given the time and training to understand what they are up against in AI, it would greatly benefit the learning environment and critical thinking skills for students.
J.P Holland, a student here at Ludlowe, discussed how he thinks using AI not to cheat, but brainstorming could be beneficial for students.
Holland also learned in talking with his parents that they can “use AI to help them write emails among other things in the real world.”
With the world of AI constantly evolving and never going away, we need to learn to harness AI and use it for the many exceptional opportunities it offers.
