In recent decades, multiple new technologies have transformed students’ school experiences through changes in learning, teaching and assessment styles. AI is already doing the same, and the changes have not finished, as schools continue to work out how to adapt and as the technology itself continues to transform.
Much is left to to be seen as to the impact of AI in education, and so we dare not speculate about that here — as interesting as it may be! For now, there are two key things we want our students to understand about the use of AI such as ChatGPT for their schoolwork: First, your school sets the rules, and second, the guiding principle is always learning, not grades.
#1: Your school sets the rules
In his helpful guide to Generative AI (GenAI) in education, Practical AI Strategies, Leon Furze defines GenAI as the use of machine learning methods on large
data sets, which then enable AI to ‘generate new data’ — such as text (as in ChatGPT), images and audio, and lines of code (pp. 8–9). Text generation in particular raises questions for the many text-based tasks students currently undertake as part of their schooling.
Some students and parents will have questions about what GenAI means for plagiarism, but Furze helpfully points out that the key issue for GenAI is not plagiarism, but cheating. Because GenAI generates new data and doesn’t directly copy it, it isn’t plagiarising any human authors. Likewise, when a student, say, uses text produced by ChatGPT, the student isn’t plagiarising i.e. passing off another person’s work as their own. ChatGPT itself doesn’t have any ‘property rights’ which can be transgressed.
However, we may still feel discomfort at the idea of students presenting text produced by ChatGPT as their own work, even if it isn’t strictly speaking an act of plagiarism. That is because it could very well be cheating. Cheating is a problem because of lack of honesty, lack of fairness, and avoidance of the work (which has been set for a reason — more on this in the next section). But whether something counts as cheating depends upon how the task is defined.
There are a variety of ways that GenAI could be used as part of completing an assessable piece of work, and they won’t all count as ‘cheating’ in every case. For example, we can imagine a situation where a teacher sets a creative writing task and suggests to the class as a whole that they use ChatGPT to generate interesting writing prompt ideas, which they are then to draft and edit their own responses to. A student who uses ChatGPT to generate a prompt would obviously not be cheating in this scenario, whereas a student who uses it to generate the actual response would be.
Ideally, the instructions for a task should make clear when and how, if at all, GenAI may be used to assist completion of the task. However, because the technology is still reasonably new, teachers may not yet be taking the step to decide on this and make it explicit in the instructions. Therefore, the best course of action for students at this stage is to talk to the teacher first if there is any part of the task that they wish to use GenAI to complete (if the instructions don’t already make the expectations clear).
Communicating and seeking clarification is the best policy to avoid the situation of students making use of GenAI, only to later find out they weren’t supposed to and have unintentionally ‘cheated’.
We understand that students may feel impatient with how slowly their school responds and adapts to the new technology. In time, we expect that many schools will not only be setting clear boundaries around GenAI use, but will be intentionally incorporating its use in various ways as part of students’ education. However, this will take time as we all collectively explore the import of GenAI use for education. It is natural and appropriate for schools to carefully consider the implications before introducing any radical changes in the way students learn and are taught — and therefore patience is needed.
#2: Learning, not grades
As the use of GenAI becomes normalised, students will have to make many decisions of their own about when and how they use it. Sometimes, when they are
under a lot of pressure, they may feel the temptation to cheat with it especially keenly. And even more often, they may find themselves wondering about the point of the work they are being asked to do: ‘Why do I need to edit my own work when ChatGPT can do it for me, and even do a better job?’
Through all this, it is important that they keep one principle in mind: the purpose of their whole education, including the assessments, is learning, not grades.
While assessment tasks do test students’ progress, they also have the effect of supporting and reinforcing students’ actual learning. This is easiest to see in the case of tests and exams. Because a test is set at the end of a topic, students are encouraged to revise the topic, which then makes it more likely that their new knowledge will ‘stick’. Therefore, tests don’t just assess students’ learning, they actually promote it.
The same is true for the kinds of tasks, whether in-class tasks, homework or assignments, where students might wish to make use of GenAI instead of doing the work themselves.
Take a writing task as an example. Writing is not just an act of stringing words together in a way that is intelligible to another person. Writing is also an act of thinking. Reading something someone else has written simply does not have the same effect on you as writing something of your own on the topic. You may have had the experience before of making a plan for what you are going to write, but then in the process of writing your ideas developed, deepened, or even went off into a somewhat different direction than you had originally planned. That’s because the activity of writing is helping you to make new connections between ideas and grow your understanding. Those connections can’t happen if ChatGPT ‘writes’ for you.
Speaking works in a similar way. If you’ve even been in the situation of trying to explain something you’ve just learned to someone else, you should relate to this. You may have racked your memory and fumbled about for the right words to begin with, but by the end of it you yourself came away with a much better understanding of the topic than you had before you tried to explain it.
All this is not to say that we shouldn’t ever be making use of GenAI for these things. But for students, whose main focus at their time of life is to learn, the use should probably be sparing.
Students, don’t let GenAI deprive you of your learning. The work may be harder without it, but the reward is much greater.
If you would like us to assist your student with adding more tools to their tool box to support their learning you can get in touch with us here.
