Could ChatGPT push students from ‘why read’ to ‘why think’? Premium

Prof. Anurag Mehra, who teaches at IIT Bombay, delves into the threats ChatGPT poses to learning.

ChatGPT is a large-language model – a powerful algorithm that can ‘chat’ with a user in eerily human fashion, drawing on word arrangements and patterns it has ‘learnt’ from the millions of pieces of text, including books and articles on the internet, it has been fed. It was built and released by the American company OpenAI.

It has already cleared an MBA examination set by Wharton Business School faculty, and did reasonably well in law examinations. It wrote a piece of law whose objective is to regulate the use of such chatbots. Students have also been using it to write essays and produce code while lobbyists have started using it to draft petitions.

Academic institutions are rightly concerned about its impact on academic activities that are currently used to evaluate and grade academic work, such as essays and computer programs.

The author asked ChatGPT to pen a critique of the ideas of Ivan Illich, the Austrian philosopher who wrote, among other things, the famous book ‘Deschooling Society’ (1971). This is a typical essay assignment to students. ChatGPT responded with a piece that would have bagged a B+ or an A-.

The primary problem for educationists is that ChatGPT can produce coherent, well-written text that is hard to distinguish from something a human would write. At the moment, there is some scope to develop tools to detect signs of robotic authorship, but it is likely to diminish as the bots become better. The rise of Google Search augured the rise of common plagiarism; today, the use of plagiarism detection software is mandatory in most academic settings.

ChatGPT could upend this state of affairs by combining the activities of searching for source material, collating and synthesising it, and finally producing human-like text into one straightforward activity. That is, all examinations that involve these steps can now be automated. It may still struggle with sourcing and attribution, especially when offering a claim that draws from multiple sources, but solving this could just as well be a matter of time, as the impending integration of such bots with search engines indicates.

This in turn would constrain the activities that teachers currently use to test and grade students’ work to in-person interactive sessions, such as oral examinations and in-class proctored exams. Another hack may be to ask students to write about what they have written in a more personal vein: what they learned, what they found difficult, etc. This may not always be possible, and as ChatGPT and its peers become more sophisticated, evaluation exercises are likely to become more complex, and perhaps less indicative of the material being examined.