Daniel Hickey & Qianxu Morgan Luo
Like millions of others, we have been quite impressed by the power of ChatGPT. Numerous media accounts argue that education will never be the same. It is remarkably capable of generating original prose that is not detectable by the current generation of plagiarism detectors like Turnitin. Many have noted that ChatGPT is particularly good at writing "compare and contrast" essays that many educators presumed were difficult or impossible to hack by rewriting information located on the web.
ChatGPT really exploded in December 2022. We suspect that many educators saw a massive improvement in the depth and quality of take-home exams and end-of-semester essays at that time. We predict that many of us are going to find our existing approaches to instruction and assessment upended once the new semester begins.
What Does Media Say So Far?
We are systematically analyzing the accounts as they come out. As of today, we are up to 27, which includes both objective reports as well as editorials. Here is what we have found so far:
- Eight of them were classified as "worried" or "very worried." These included Stephen Marche's prescient 2021 article in The New Yorker that examined an earlier writing bot. Recognizing the rapid massive improvement, Marche wrote "the undergraduate essay, the basic pedagogical mode of all humanities, will soon be under severe pressure."
- Fifteen were classified as "mixed." Many of these were media accounts that aimed to be objective. New Yorker technology columnist Kevin Roose pointed out that ChatGPT is "ominously good at answering the types of open-ended questions that frequently appear on school assignments" but is "prone to giving wrong answers." Many suggested in-class handwritten essay exams or asking students to give impromptu presentations on ostensibly authored assignments.
- Four were classified as "positive" or "very positive." Most reminded readers of similar concerns with prior technologies like spell checkers and blamed the risk on shallow instruction. For example, English Professor Blaine Gretemen's editorial in Newsweek argued that it is "time for a new final exam, one that demands students find out something about themselves, and to tell you in a voice that is their own."
Are our observations of the media coverage so far:
- As proponents and scholars of online learning, We were surprised by the lack of discussion of the specific consequences for online education. Such settings are likely to preclude in-class essays or impromptu presentations as a short-term response.
- Given all the suggestions that educators will need to assign in-class handwritten essays, We are surprised that no one has mentioned that many young people are incapable of writing legibly at the speed that would be needed for this to be practical.
- As learning scientists, we worry that there has not been enough attention to the crucial role that writing plays in learning. As Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter convinced us in the late 1980s, skilled writers engage in knowledge construction where they use text to overcome the limits of short-term memory. In contrast to more novice knowledge-telling writers, skilled writers typically know a lot more when they complete an essay, article, or assignment.
- To the advocates who liken ChatGPT to other innovations (from the slide rule to graphing calculators to Google Translate), a week of experimentation has convinced us that ChatGPT is already more powerful than all of the other technologies combined. And it is only going to get more powerful.
- Typical high school English and the five-paragraph essay are responsible for training a generation of knowledge tellers.
- Many of the suggestions for thwarting ChatGPT are very labor-intensive. We are currently writing another blog post that will dig more deeply into this issue.
- It linked to the public page from Anna Mills compiling suggestions for essay prompts that might thwart chatbots.
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