Student or bot? Schools grapple with ChatGPT

While ChatGPT has caused concern in school districts, college campuses and other institutions across the country, it has not been a problem so far in Homewood City Schools, school leaders said.

“ChatGPT has not been a problem at our school, but it is something we are [aware] of and are educating our teachers and students about,” said Mindy McBride, assistant principal at Homewood High School. “We view it as another tool or resource that students have access to at home, so we want everyone to know the potential benefits and limitations of it in an educational setting.”

ChatGPT, created by OpenAI, is one of several new online content generators, which responds to prompts from users and can answer questions and write poems, essays, songs, speeches and more. It is trained to detect what it says is “misinformation” and also rejects what it deems as inappropriate or harmful, according to both reports and numerous tests conducted by The Homewood Star.

The technology’s influence is growing by leaps and bounds, according to a report by Reuters. It took Netflix 3½ years to get to 1 million users. It took Twitter two years. Facebook achieved 1 million users in 10 months, while Spotify surpassed the mark in five months. Instagram outpaced them all, obtaining 1 million users in 2½ months.

ChatGPT had more than 1 million users in five days.

Other tools in development include Google’s “Bard” and Baidu’s “Ernie bot.” Microsoft’s existing tool “Bing” will also incorporate technology created by OpenAI, per a company press release.

Homewood High School teacher Leslie Anastasia, who teaches AP English, recently gave a presentation to staff and administration at the school on how it works and its potential usefulness for students and faculty.

“I was interested in how it could be used as a tool,” Anastasia said.

Anastasia said, for example, she is learning Spanish with Duolingo. She was able to submit a paragraph written in Spanish to ChatGPT, which then showed her grammatical errors. 

To an extent, the technology is only as intelligent and capable as the person using it, Anastasia said. Submitting better input leads to better output.

“To write good input, you have to understand what good writing looks like,” Anastasia said.

Because of that, she isn’t as worried about students abusing the technology to get ahead, as those who input basic prompts will likely only receive a “C” grade.

In addition, most of the writing in the school’s English classes is done in the actual class setting, Anastasia said.

“We do so little [as a department] out of class,” she said. “Most of us do in-class writing.”

McBride said hand-written assignments are encouraged and computer usage in the classroom is expected to be monitored by teachers. 

ChatGPT is not blocked on school servers, though students will not be asked to create an account by teachers as the technology’s terms of use state it is not for use by anyone under the age of 18. 

Students are timed on their writing and while they can sometimes take writing home to make changes, they must be able to explain why they made the changes, Anastasia said.

Instead of seeing students use the technology to cheat, Anastasia said one student brought in a ChatGPT-generated essay, not to try to pass it off for a grade, but as a launching point for a discussion about the tool’s merits and what it lacks.

Students have seen the limitations of ChatGPT, Anastasia said, so they can “coach” it to write better content when they do use it. ChatGPT is like a calculator, in that it can go “beyond four times four,” but its users still have to understand the fundamentals of math in order to use it. In the same way, students have to have an understanding of “facts and claims” in order to properly use ChatGPT, Anastasia said.

Teachers are also focused on teaching students what it means to be a good digital citizen and how to use tools like ChatGPT in the “real world” and in college, McBride said.

“As with all new technology and available resources, we focus on teaching our students how to be responsible digital citizens,” McBride said. “We do not try to limit their access to resources; we want to educate them on ways that resources can be beneficial.”

Anastasia said there are discussions ongoing in the classroom about how to handle the ethics of tools like ChatGPT.

“Do y’all think we should cite it when we use it? … How would we indicate that we’ve used it?” McBride said as an example of what questions are being asked. “When you’re writing something personal, like a thank-you note for your graduation presents, is that ethical?”

Anastasia said she’s had conversations with her students about how they would feel if she used ChatGPT to write them a letter of recommendation, assuming she tells the truth about them and inputs the facts.

“So we’ll have debates about how they feel about me writing a letter about them in that way,” she said. “It’s just a discussion at this point. I don’t tell them what the ethics of it are, because it’s so new.”

McBride said there are still questions about the “ethics, responsible use and reliability” of technology like ChatGPT.

“I anticipate that we will continue to navigate these waters with ChatGPT along with any additional technology that is sure to come in the future,” McBride said.