ChatGPT sends shockwaves across college campuses

In four short months, the GPT family of artificial intelligence chatbots have upended higher education like nothing since the arrival of Wi-Fi connections in classrooms.

ChatGPT and its smarter, younger cousin, GPT-4, can create a realistic facsimile of a college term paper on command, or populate the answers to a midterm. At the start of the 2022-23 academic year, few professors had heard of it. They are learning fast.

“I think this is the greatest creative disruptor to education and instruction in a generation,” said Sarah Eaton, an associate professor of education at the University of Calgary who studies AI.

The impact of this quickly developing technology has sparked varying concerns across colleges and fields of study due to its implications for academic honesty and learning.

Not everyone sees this technology as an earth-shattering phenomenon, however. Some are excited about the implications it can have on learning.

“There just hasn’t been panic here on campus. In fact, the university is absolutely a wonderful place to consider all the implications both good and bad, and challenges and new questions raised by any kind of new technology, because we have people who are going to think about the problems from so many different angles and orientations,” said Jenny Frederick, executive director of the Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning and associate provost for Academic Initiatives.

Across universities, professors have been looking into ways to engage students so cheating with ChatGPT is not as attractive, such as making assignments more personalized to students’ interests and requiring students to complete brainstorming assignments and essay drafts instead of just one final paper.

Frederick conceded that at Yale, an Ivy League school with many resources at its disposal, it could be easier for the college to embrace the technology without fear.

At small schools, such as Texas Woman’s University, ChatGPT has provoked more hesitancy.

“I think the majority, the sentiment from the majority of my sort of academic network is one of sort of anxiety and fear,” said Daniel Ernst, associate professor of English at the school.

Texas Woman’s University held a workshop for faculty at the end of January regarding ChatGPT. Genevieve West, chair of the school’s Department of Language, Culture & Gender Studies, said she saw a generational divide at the event: Younger professors were more excited about the technology, while older professors voiced more concerns.

Since launching in late November, ChatGPT has already garnered 100 million users. Its use quickly surged on campuses in that time. In an informal and anonymous January poll, 17 percent of Stanford students acknowledged using ChatGPT in their fall finals. Most said they used AI only to brainstorm, outline and spitball. A tiny share said they submitted ChatGPT work as their own.

The rapid popularization of the new technology has sent both small and large schools scrambling to develop guidelines on how to approach it.

Stephanie Frank, an associate professor of instruction in religion and the humanities at Columbia College in Chicago, spent the last few hectic weeks on a task force to decide how the faculty should handle chatbots.

“The point of this was to get something out before midterms, which were this week for us,” she said. The task force issued a memo to faculty on Wednesday.

Columbia organized the work group after a professor caught a student “pretty flagrantly” using ChatGPT for answers on a quiz, Frank said. The professor canceled the next quiz, asking students instead to submit handwritten class notes. The same student provided handwritten notes that appeared to have been copied from ChatGPT.

Rather than set campus-wide rules, the Columbia College task force urged professors to make individual decisions about whether and when students should be allowed — or encouraged, or even assigned — to use AI.

Youngmoo Kim, a computer scientist, sits on a similar committee at Drexel University studying chatbots. The panel aims to issue guidance to the school by the end of March.

“We’re looking to put out guidelines for all of our faculty,” he said. “Not commandments.”