ChatGPT Cheating Fears Seem Overstated

There have been all sorts of overblown fears and moral panics raised by the availability of new generative AI tools. And one that I keep hearing about, which many people have accepted as obviously true, is that it will damage school education, as kids will just use ChatGPT to do their work.

This has always been a bit overblown for a variety of reasons, including that by its very nature, ChatGPT output tends to be average" at best, and for anything that involves any level of deeper thinking, it tends to be pretty obvious, pretty quickly, that the tool just isn't that good.

Now, the NY Times has highlighted how some recent Stanford research has called into question the entire premise. It's based on an ongoing series of anonymous surveys to students regarding a variety of behavior that might impact their education that is done by a school reform nonprofit named Challenge Success. As the co-founder of that group, Denise Pope, notes, the survey seeks to find out honest answers on things like the amount of sleep they get, homework pressure, extracurricular activities, family expectations, things like that - and also several questions about different forms of cheating."

She notes that the latest surveys don't suggest any mass increase in cheating, and that the numbers of students who say they've cheated have mostly held steady. You could argue that that's not really the point, as the nature of the cheating could be very different, even if the number of kids doing it remains the same, but there were some other interesting findings:

But I think it's important to point out that, in Challenge Success' most recent survey, students were also asked if and how they felt an AI chatbot like ChatGPT should be allowed for school-related tasks. Many said they thought it should be acceptable for starter" purposes, like explaining a new concept or generating ideas for a paper. But the vast majority said that using a chatbot to write an entire paper should never be allowed. So this idea that students who've never cheated before are going to suddenly run amok and have AI write all of their papers appears unfounded.

And, this is actually encouraging, because that kind of use of ChatGPT... is actually good? It's the kind of way that the tool should also be used in the real world. These tools can be useful starting points or brainstorming tools.

As she later notes, if anything, these tools may be leveling the playing field a bit:

Even before ChatGPT, we could never be sure whether kids were getting help from a parent or tutor or another source on their assignments, and this was not considered cheating. Kids in our focus groups are wondering why they can't use ChatGPT as another resource to help them write their papers - not to write the whole thing word for word, but to get the kind of help a parent or tutor would offer. We need to help students and educators find ways to discuss the ethics of using this technology and when it is and isn't useful for student learning.

The NY Times piece also points to a recent Pew survey that also pours some cold water on the idea that kids are just ramping up their cheating by using ChatGPT, that seems to support the Stanford study as well. Again, students feel okay using it for things that seem perfectly reasonable, such as researching topics, but a much smaller percentage find it acceptable for writing.

And of course, we keep hearing about productive and useful ways to use ChatGPT in school. One of my favorites is an idea that some teachers have used, asking students to deliberately have ChatGPT write an essay, and then they have to submit the prompt they came up with for the essay, the essay, and (most importantly) the final essay showing the corrections they'd make to the ChatGPT essay.

To me, this seems like a pretty powerful tool for learning when used this way, rather than just freaking out and trying to ban it entirely. I know that years ago, I realized that the best way to truly learn something is to teach it to someone else, as their questions and confusion force you to understand the topic you're teaching at a much deeper level. If ChatGPT or other AI tools can stand in as the learner" in those scenarios, it could be a huge boost to better learning.