Up@dawn 2.0 (blogger)

Delight Springs

Thursday, December 15, 2022

The end of the student essay as we've known it?

ChatGPT Is Dumber Than You Think
Treat it like a toy, not a tool.

"When OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public last week, the first and most common reaction I saw was fear that it would upend education. "You can no longer give take-home exams," Kevin Bryan, a University of Toronto professor, posted on Twitter. "I think chat.openai.com may actually spell the end of writing assignments," wrote Samuel Bagg, a University of South Carolina political scientist. That's the fear...
Imagine worrying about the fate of take-home essay exams, a stupid format that everyone hates but nobody has the courage to kill." --Ian Bogost, Atlantic

I don't hate that format, or think it stupid. A student blogpost is basically a take-home essay. But I've already shifted to more in-class presentations, maybe the advent of essay-writing AI will and should encourage more of that. More oral exams too.

Or maybe I can just continue to trust most of my students to do their own work, and verify that they've done so the old-fashioned way: by talking to them and getting to know them. 

Better that, I think, than allow the small fraction of would-be cheaters to dictate the terms of our classroom activity. 

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