Chatbot essay cheating alarms schools

Schools are scrambling to control a global chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to write ‘cheat’ assignments and essays accurate enough to trick teachers.

Schools are concerned that students will use chatbots such as ChatGPT to cheat. Photo: Istock

Schools are scrambling to ­control a global chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to write “cheat” assignments and essays accurate enough to trick ­teachers.

State and territory curriculum authorities are brain­storming ways to detect computer-generated answers to assignments, exams and essays using ChatGPT, which ­evades traditional plagiarism checks.

“Goodbye homework!’’ was the response of tech billionaire Elon Musk, in a recent Tweet.

Australia’s school principals are alarmed that teachers will be expected to control the cheating.

The nation’s biggest education department is reassessing its assessment methods – potentially requiring students to give verbal or handwritten responses to assignments done in class – as part of reforms to the NSW curriculum. “We are reviewing ­student access to specific AI ­software, including ChatGPT, when using a department device or our secured network,’’ said a NSW Education Department spokesperson.

Australian Secondary School Principals Association president Andrew Pierpoint warned that AI would render students “academically lazy’’, and demanded action from education authorities. He said schools might have to place more emphasis on ­assignments, essays or exams written under classroom supervision, either by hand or on laptops disconnected from the internet.

“It‘s uncharted territory for schools,’’ he said. “It will make students academically lazy. Kids’ marks will be inflated or deflated and who knows what that will lead to, with university entrance. This is a really serious issue.’’

Mr Pierpoint said essays and assignments were designed to teach students to research, analyse and build arguments, rather than parrot material found online. He said education departments could block AI websites in schools at the “click of a button’’ but had no control over what students accessed at home.

“You can’t just leave it to principals to sort out,’’ he said. “That’s irresponsible and ­ineffective because there will be so much variation between schools.’’

New York’s Education Department has already banned the use of ChatGPT on the grounds it does not build skills for critical thinking.

Artificial intelligence developer OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30 last year, after most Australian students had finished their assignments and exams. Now schools are scrambling to find ways to detect and control use of the chatbot, before school resumes this month.

The impact of the technology is being likened to the advent of calculators and internet search engines, as teachers debate whether to ban or embrace the technology.

Mentone Grammar School English teacher Terry Matthew asked her son to use AI to write one of the essay topics she had ­assigned to her Year 12 class at the Melbourne private school.

“(He) was able to get the computer to generate a 600-word response in under three minutes,’’ she wrote on LinkedIn.

“He was able to tailor the essay to suit all the requirements laid out by the VCAA.

“Thus I now require students to include evidence which they have sourced themselves (through surveys, life experience or reading newspapers etc).’’

Ms Matthew said her students must provide “current and Australian evidence’’ to back their essays and research.

“I will also be doing as much in-class writing as time allows,’’ she wrote. “The other strategy I will use is to look at how AI ­responds to prompts and encourage students to find the strengths and weaknesses in the writing.’’

Anti-cheating technology Turnitin, used by many schools and universities to detect plagiarism, has announced plans to roll out a service later this year to ­detect if an assignment has been written by ChatGPT.

Honor McGregor, an educational developer at the Australian National University, said it was a “kneejerk response to ban a new tool/technology’’.

“We need to educate students to use AI as a tool, not ban it!’’ she wrote on LinkedIn, adding that using the chatbot would be a “great tool for testing higher order thinking skills”. “Ask students to generate (an) assessment response using AI and then ask them to critique it,’’ she said.

ChatGPT uses “Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback” – based on vast amounts of human conversations on the internet – to generate human-like written responses to prompts and questions.

Its website states that “ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers’’.

Open AI does not specifically refer to cheating on its website, but when the term “using ChatGPT to cheat” is typed into the chatbot it responds that “it is not appropriate or ethical to use a language model like ChatGPT to cheat on tests or assignments’’.

When The Weekend Australian asked ChatGPT to write an article about its use in cheating, the chatbot produced a headline: “ChatGPT: A new way to cheat.’’

“Many students are using ChatGPT to cheat on their exams,’’ it wrote. “In a recent test, 90 per cent of the students who took the test used ChatGPT to get the answers.’’

NSW Education Department officials, who are liaising with interstate counterparts to tackle the AI challenge, will consider changing assessment methods as part of curriculum reform. A NSW Education Standards Authority spokesperson said it required all schools to implement their own assessment policy, “which includes measures to prevent malpractice and the consequences of malpractice in school-based assessment tasks’’.

Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority chief executive Jacqueline Wilton said: “We are continuing to monitor the impact and potential of AI tools’’.

A South Australian Education Standards Board spokeswoman said schools were required to have adequate policies, procedures and practices in place in an evolving environment, including relating to new technologies”.

The Office of Tasmanian Assessment, Standards and Certification said senior high school students were assessed based on pen-and-paper exams, oral presentations and folios of work certified by the class teacher.

A Victorian Education Department spokesman said it was “monitoring the situation and reviewing the risks’’.