In class, Jeff confidently proclaimed, “The essay is dead,” as he introduced ChatGPT to us. While I appreciate his perspective and acknowledge that many people are fearful of ChatGPT because of students’ newfound and easily accessible methods for cheating, I disagree. We may need to develop some new methods for checking that students’ work is truly original, but ChatGPT has certainly not killed off the essay or brought an end to students’ abilities to produce original work.
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As other professors and guest speakers have mentioned, there are many ways to ensure that students only receive credit for their own work. One of the best methods is to collect frequent informal writing samples from students throughout the year in order to determine their writing voice and the vocabulary they typically use in writing. The more writing samples that a teacher collects, the more they will get to know their students as writers and be able to recognize their writing without even reading the name at the top of a paper. For me, informal writing samples will likely manifest themselves in the form of reflection-based exit tasks, on-the-spot written book reports, and perhaps even surprise in-class essay drafts or essay outlines. Such methods will allow me to not only become acquainted with my students as writers and therefore equip me to recognize when a formal essay is not their own, they will also help me better assess my students’ areas for improvement. Additionally, it may prove fruitful to provide more time in class for students to work on essays. Students might be allotted a week or so to write their essays, submitting topic ideas over the weekend, outlines developed on a Monday, rough drafts written across several days, and final drafts that demonstrate incorporation of peer or teacher feedback. If we chunk out essays meaningfully and collect outlines, evidence from sources, drafts, and peer feedback throughout the process, we may be able to limit cheating, especially as students who require extra support are able to receive help in class. Furthermore, ChatGPT only has access to information prior to 2021, meaning that essays involving current events or texts published since 2021 are ChatGPT-proof as far as gathering evidence and accurate information goes. There are likely many more methods for circumventing students using AI to cheat on essays, and I am curious to hear about any that you can think of!
This video includes several creative examples of how to create prompts or additional requirements for essays that inhibit students’ ability to cheat with ChatGPT if you are interested: ChatGPT: How to Design Assignments to Reduce Cheating
In Literacy Across the Disciplines, one of the guest speakers explained that he had seventeen instances of students cheating on essays in one year after ChatGPT was developed, but that he has already witnessed a decline in such cheating in his classroom. His method? Respond to cheating with a zero-tolerance policy. He relayed that students typically come clean once he asks them to explain their ideas further and they are not able to do so. Rather than give these students a second chance, this teacher gives them a zero for the assignment and even reports the instance to parents and administrators. While he admits that some students are repeat offenders, he claimed that many of them did not attempt to cheat again, suggesting that maintaining high expectations, boundaries, and natural consequences for cheating may work to prevent students from cheating.
Another factor to consider is that students who want to cheat have always cheated and will always cheat regardless of ChatGPT’s existence. When I was a high school, almost twenty Honors Chemistry students were caught cheating on a test after a student stole the physical answer key out of a teacher’s classroom and sent photos of it to his classmates. These students were caught because the three Honors Chemistry teachers administered multiple test forms per period, and only one version of the answer key was stolen. Teachers learned to prevent and catch cheating on physical tests long ago, they have learned to monitor online tests for cheating in recent years, and similarly, teachers will learn to prevent cheating via ChatGPT on essays and other written work.
While concern about AI such as ChatGPT is valid and often warranted, I do not believe that we should give it the credit of potentially killing essays. If teachers develop other methods for assessing student writing, create time in their classroom for the bulk of essay writing, and enforce natural consequences for cheating, I believe that the essay will still be an effective assessment of students’ abilities to analyze a text, synthesize an interpretation, and structure an argument. AI will continue to threaten our ability to assess our students' skills, but we must respond to that threat with solutions rather than fear or the extermination of valuable forms of assessment.
Thank you Sophie for being thoughtful about this.
ReplyDeleteFor an English class does using your own voice with the availability of Chat GPT mean that the future of writing looks like creatively piecing together the online world? For instance, will it matter less that someone can write following the requirements of a rubric (AI could do this for you) and matter more what someone is creating through Chat GPT? If we catch someone "cheating" using Chat GPT but we are child centered educators should we adopt the assignment so that they have to use Chat GPT creatively? Come up with something new? Are values and creativity and the stories we tell going to be more important? Will people be able to specialize in their intelligence area and let go of trying to become skilled in another content area? Mr. Lang said he was able to have Chat GPT create something that "hallucinated" several Shakespeare dramas into one. Will future English classes be more about theme and rhetorical analysis and less about the skill of putting together an essay?
DeleteI really enjoyed reading this, thanks for writing it! I definitely agree with your point about moving more of the essay-writing process into class and chunking it up more. I think both will reduce the use of ChatGPT in essay-writing, and I think they are also things teachers should be doing more generally regardless of AI.
ReplyDeleteCollecting a lot of evidence about your students' work and processes seems like it could be time-consuming, but it helps you have a paper trail that you can track down if you start to doubt that a student turned in their own work. I expect that having the paper trail will often enough be deterrent to students considering using AI for writing, since creating all the different "chunked assignments" with AI and making them cohesive and realistic is probably more work than just writing those assignments themselves!
I love it.....I hope I'm wrong about the essay...I really do. At the same time as you point out there are so many ways to assess students other than essays that maybe this will push us just a bit to think of alternative assessments. The essay might be dead...but blog posts live on!!!! Which are essays shared with the world....so...... :)
ReplyDeleteSo good Sophie! I saw what you were saying playing out in my mind as I read - that we can teach students to form a thesis and argumentative essay using analog, maybe even about the use of ChatGPT in school. This would likely be something they've given a great deal of thought or at the very least want to engage in, plus it could give us deeper insight into their feelings on it.
ReplyDeleteHaxton was talking about many of her students feeling tech-fatigue last semester, so she provided a charging station that allowed students to justify leaving their phones across the room for the period. Maybe we will see something similar with computers and tablets soon too. And this strikes me, as you say, as a balancing act - that we want our students to be highly literate in all major areas of communication; reading, writing, and knowledge acquisition. This last does seem to now include technology, which both complicates and simplifies our lives.
I'm really looking forward to hearing how your mentor teachers are responding to tech in their classrooms.