ChatGPT: Victorian universities offer mixed responses on how they will manage AI chatbot
An incredible new artificial intelligence chatbot can write essays and answer exam questions – so how will Victorian schools and universities stop students cheating with it?
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Victoria’s universities will take an open minded but cautious approach to dealing with the emergence of artificial intelligence programs like ChatGPT.
The new ChatGPT software, produced by Elon Musk’s company Open AI late last year, has divided scholars worldwide due its ability to formulate comprehensive responses to written requests.
While still in its early stages, the software can spit out essays, poetry, news articles and simplify complex topics in ways school kids can understand within seconds.
Musk has described ChatGPT as “scary good”.
Despite fears students, particularly at tertiary level, will use ChatGPT to write their assignments for them, the state’s universities are yet to hit the panic button.
La Trobe, Swinburne, Deakin and Melbourne universities will “continue to review” the impact ChatGPT may have on assessments, as well as teaching students to apply “critical thinking” to any new software.
Swinburne Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Chief Academic Officer, Professor Chris Pilgrim said the university will continue to monitor its impact.
“Swinburne is a future-focused university that innovates, disrupts, renews and changes to create tomorrow’s technology and talent today,” Professor Pilgrim said.
“We are still assessing the potential impact ChatGPT may have on university assessments.”
“Given that these tools will be ubiquitous in the future, we must educate students to be critical consumers of this technology, educating them to use these tools carefully to augment their learning will be a priority.”
Likewise, a La Trobe University spokesperson said measures around plagiarism will also be reviewed.
“GPT-3 and AI of this type is impressive with implications for teaching now and into future. La Trobe continuously reviews emerging technologies to better understand the impacts on our policy and practice, and how they could benefit teaching and student learning,” the spokesperson said.
“La Trobe has a robust academic integrity process and training for both students and staff, that will limit plagiarism based on this technology. We are currently reviewing our academic integrity policies and assessment practices to minimise any risk to academic integrity, and further developing our training and support for staff and students.”
Deakin vice-chancellor Professor Liz Johnson said the university would not revert back to pen and paper exams.
“The recent emergence of ChatGPT and other AI tools have sparked calls for a return to traditional exam hall testing,” she said.
“This fails to recognise this mode of assessment had significant flaws of its own, especially challenges with the relevance of assessment tasks to real-world skills and difficulties with access to onsite testing locations experienced by some students.
“It is the university’s view that traditional pen and paper exams do not represent the type of contexts and work that graduates will work in. Indeed, many students may be required to use AI or similar technologies in their future careers.
“As an innovative and proactive educator, our focus is to instead support our students to develop awareness, knowledge and skill in the ethical and responsible use of these tools so they graduate as digitally fluent citizens and employees.
“We will continue to prioritise contemporary online assessments over traditional onsite exam formats in 2023 and there are also no plans to return to pen and paper exams.
“Students will be asked to acknowledge when AI tools have been used and shown how to use them appropriately. We will monitor assessment submissions with multi-layered authenticity tools which are also evolving rapidly.
“Our policies regarding cheating will continue to be revised and updated to reflect new technological advancements.”
An RMIT spokesperson highlighted the “challenges to academic integrity” programs like ChatGPT pose and how it plans on “discouraging students from turning to these cheating mechanisms through quality learning and wellbeing supports and services”.
“RMIT has implemented a number of key initiatives in this critical area, including new detection methods, clear and frequent communications to students on this issue and ensuring the outcomes of investigations are swiftly actioned,” they said.
Similarly, Monash University cited its student academic integrity procedure, which defines the use of AI technologies as “academic misconduct”, when contacted by the Herald Sun.
“Monash University does not tolerate any form of academic or research misconduct. Monash is committed to creating a learning environment underpinned by the highest standards of academic integrity,” a Monash spokesperson said.
In the US, ChatGPT has been banned at New York public schools, while a recent study completed by researchers in California discovered the software was capable of passing three second-year medical exams.
AI expert and Professor of computer science at The University of Melbourne, Tim Miller, has also experimented with ChatGPT.
He said while it was able to answer certain questions well, it was not hard to find questions capable of “tricking” it.
“I‘ve run through a heap of exam questions that we that we have put in as a last few years, and it’s able to answer them. You certainly wouldn’t know it’s not the person answering,” he said.
“It‘s answered them somewhat convincingly, some of them at the level of someone who’s slightly familiar with the topic, but not thinking deeply about some of them really well.
“It was interesting. I had two versions of the same question.
“I asked it to look at these two things that we covered in our notes in 2019 and compare them.
“It did okay on that one. I probably would have given it, two out of four. Maybe another mark would have given the three out of four.
“For the second question, I painted a scenario that said, you‘ve got a colleague and this is a problem, the colleague suggests this, do you agree with them?
“For that one it kind of lost in the detail of the scenario and just looked for the keywords that were able to explain the two concepts and it got all thrown off by the idea of a colleague and everything like that.”
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Experts, like Professor Miller, have also identified its ability to help people complete “mundane tasks”.
Its benefit for teachers is something Bayside College history teacher, Effie Hatz, said she is keen to explore when the new school year begins.
The software’s ability to create things like rubrics in table form and essay questions is something which could be a “game changer” according to Ms Hatz.
“I will definitely use it to help me create my rubrics, because that can take a lot of time,” she said.
“It can be time consuming to create that guide which shows students what they need to do to achieve a high standard, so I will trial it out with that.
“With curriculums and study designs constantly changing, a lot of pressure is placed on teachers and the adjusting never-ending, so this could be something that helps with that.
“It will save you time for the tasks that are onerous and time consuming.”
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