2024-07-10 14:51:25
Since ChatGPT entered the lives of students, teachers have seen a surge in copies entirely written by AI. A fad or a disruption of the school?
“I stopped giving homework, it’s a waste of time, half the students hand me in a text that isn’t their own. So, I reserve writing texts for class work.” An English teacher in a high school in Val-de-Marne, Servane recently changed her teaching methods and she’s not the only one. On the r/Teachers subreddit, many testimonies point in the same direction. “I try to do more assessments that require creativity, or oral assessments,” says Hugo*, a professor of biological sciences at a Swiss university institute, while Florien, a high school German teacher, questions “the trust we can place in our students.”
ChatGPT, the ultimate anti-drought
Behind this new lack of confidence, one culprit keeps coming back: the great ChatGPT language model, free for all, and therefore for students, since November 2022. The text-generating AI has become the bête noire of middle and high school teachers, who find its trace in many copies. “It has become a subject of jokes in the teachers’ lounge,” continues Servane. “We share the students’ copy-and-paste nuggets. A few weeks ago, a philosophy teacher showed us an essay entirely generated by ChatGPT. We might read the sentence “as an artificial intelligence, I have no personal opinion,” copied as is. Others are more cunning. They generate a text at home, learn it by heart, and spit it out during the assignment in class. It’s not technically cheating, but I’m not sure the student understood anything during the lesson.”
Initially caught off guard, teachers have since developed techniques to spot cheaters. The most obvious is to compare the differences in language levels between what students usually produce and their copies. Servane details how cheating can lack subtlety. “I suddenly find myself with copies that have a very convoluted vocabulary level and sentence structure. If I have any doubts, I just have to ask them to explain to me what they wrote. In general, I find that they do not understand the sentences they used.” For Bérénice*, a modern literature teacher at the high school, the poverty of the work submitted is also a mark of recognition of ChatGPT. “They do not know how to use this tool, and it gives very vague answers that only partially correspond to the subject. There are no precise references to the text, the quotes do not refer to anything, the ideas are not developed. The grade obtained cannot be good. ” Added to this are strange details such as the fact that some students hand in three almost identical copies, that others hand in a very long block of text where a simple sentence was required. Beyond the proven cases of cheating, teachers deplore a form of “standardization” of students’ work. “I see massive use in English classes,” reveals Jean-Laurent, a secondary school teacher. It is a technological tool, but one that shakes up the lines and standardizes everything related to reflection and independent work.”
“ChatGPT has become my second mother”
Between teachers and students, a game of cat and mouse seems to have set in. A whole range of tools has appeared in the wake of ChatGPT and promises to detect texts copied from an AI. These are imperfect and only give estimates, sometimes totally false, of the rate of use of an AI. But they serve to dissuade students. This is what Zachary, a 15-year-old high school student, tells us. “When we discovered ChatGPT at the beginning of 2023, we all used it to do everything we found boring, including presentations, writing plans or PowerPoint presentation content,” he explains. It changed the way we did homework. Instead of copying and pasting from different sites, which is a bit laborious, we might have an assignment entirely done in less than 15 minutes. I must have used it five or six times, but I got caught because of a tool that detects AI. After that, several of us gave up. We don’t use ChatGPT much anymore, but we try alternatives that are harder to detect.”
Despite fears, most students have tried this new technology. Some teachers interviewed estimate their massive use “especially by students in difficulty”, others speak of cheating that concerns 10% of their students. In October 2023, a survey organized by the English learning platform ISpeakSpokeSpoken indicates that 74.2% of students have already used ChatGPT for their lessons and 52% for their homework. In April 2024, another survey of 560 students published online by the school guidance platform Diplomeo showed that 79% of 16-25 year-olds use an AI tool for their studies or guidance, and among them, 55% use it at least once a month. Nearly 8 out of 10 young people admit to using it to help themselves during their lessons. While blatant cases of cheating are often spotted due to clumsiness or overly simplistic use, artificial intelligence has well and truly entered the lives of young Internet users, in the same way as Google or Wikipedia.
“When ChatGPT came out, it became my second mother,” explains Jessie, a humanities student who says she uses AI every day. “It replaced Google for many queries, because I find it easier to use. I ask it for tutorials on how to do work at home or cook eggs, it’s the one that organizes my work time in the most optimal way possible.” The same goes for Balthazar, also a humanities student, who has made AI his daily co-pilot. “It’s a great tool to introduce you to a world you don’t know,” he says. “Recently, I started following F1. Google’s Gemini (an alternative AI that is supposed to be able to connect to the Internet to retrieve information) explained all the technical vocabulary to me.”
A new learning crutch?
While middle and high school students use ChatGPT as a crutch that replaces thinking, post-baccalaureate students have more elaborate practices. This is the case for Balthazar, who has a university background in source processing – his career path led him to study History – but was also supported by his stepfather, who is passionate regarding the tool, and a childhood friend who founded a company specializing in artificial intelligence. “I do these studies a bit out of obligation,” he explains. “So, I use AI as a writing co-pilot on the subjects that bore me the most. I have never been caught, but it must be said that I don’t just do a simple copy and paste. I really use it. I spend a good half hour setting it up while explaining the context of the assignment. Often, I pretend to be a teacher who needs a precise correction for the requested exercise, which allows me to get better results. I also ask him to make me a methodological checklist. I also use Google Gemini to find sources that he will search on Cairn, a portal dedicated to publications in the humanities and social sciences. Then, I submit a basic paragraph to him, then I ask him to correct it, to rewrite it so that it fits the style of a bachelor’s student, and I ask him to provide details, additional information, etc. In the end, I manage to submit an assignment in one working day instead of a week and I get a 14 instead of a 4.”
Whether it is to cheat or to co-pilot your productions, the question raised by the use of ChatGPT remains the same: will AI alter the way we learn? Marwan, a teacher in a high school in the Paris region, provides some nuance. “The danger of using this tool first concerns independent work,” he explains. Previously, a Google search gave enough crazy results to at least force students to dig deeper, and therefore to study the question and the potential answers. ChatGPT and other AI tools spit out a weighted answer that seems to be the right one. Whether it is true or not, the result is sent, generally as is, and the tool does some of the thinking work without benefiting the student.” This is why teachers have started to integrate the tool into their lessons and advocate for its reasoned and intelligent use. This is the case for Nathalie, a middle school biology teacher, who integrates Google Gemini into the correction of homework. “From time to time, I use it in the whole class and in plain text to correct,” she explains. “I run a patent subject through Gemini, and we compare the result with the official correction. The exercise is interesting, particularly because the AI makes truncated reasoning, which allows for remediation.” The challenge will be to transmit enough knowledge to the students to graduate the quality of the sources, and technical knowledge so that they know how to communicate with the AI.
For Julien Annart, visiting professor at HEPL (Haute École de la Province de Liège), AI makes it possible to draw up a definitive assessment of the failure of scientific culture to transmit its approach and its importance. “I believe that the relationship with sources remains the major difficulty facing this new generation of students,” he explains. They have a lot of trouble distinguishing a good source from a bad one, for example. When they go to Wikipedia, they never look at the bottom of the page and take for granted everything that resembles knowledge available online, regardless of its origins. AIs like ChatGPT accentuate this problem, given that they provide information that is sometimes true, sometimes false, with a good capacity for synthesis. Those who have not been educated to go back to the sources and who consume these tools rather than using them to produce intelligence will inevitably be disadvantaged.”
* first name has been changed
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