It's so extremely over for anyone who grades papers for a living

https://ctl.utexas.edu/5-things-know-about-chatgpt

As a first step, learning about this tool will help instructors gain awareness and know to seek assistance when issues related to ChatGPT arise. In addition, the release of ChatGPT encourages us to revisit the best ways to assess student learning in a variety of instructional contexts (5). It invites us to ask important questions, such as:

• Why and how do we best equip students as strong writers?

• What other ways can students demonstrate learning in addition to written papers?

• What is the best way to solicit student writing that is meaningful and authentic?

• If students rely on ChatGPT as a source of information to answer factual questions, how will that affect their development of research skills?

This focus on the relationship between students and instructors and the educational mission of the university fits with broader efforts underway to reinforce the importance of the process of learning, including making and correcting mistakes. The university is in the process of refreshing our honor code and honor code affirmation to renew our commitment to supporting students in their journey to master complex knowledge and skills.

With these types of questions and issues in mind, we have gathered a variety of suggestions you can pick and choose to incorporate in your teaching practice if students’ use of ChatGPT is relevant for you. Incorporating 1-2 of these approaches may help ease concerns and challenges that could arise with the introduction of the ChatGPT tool.

Beginning of the semester:

• Be clear on what you want your students to know and be able to do or demonstrate by the end of the course and why that knowledge is valuable to their lives. (See this resource for assistance in developing learning outcomes for your course.) Help students see that the ways you are assessing their learning are key to understanding what they are gaining from the course and where they may need extra coaching and support. (6)

• Talk to your students about how relying heavily on this tool may interfere with achieving the learning outcomes you hope they will achieve in this course (e.g., problem solving, developing an authentic writing voice, etc.).

  • In particular, “If you can explain to students the value of writing, and convince them that you are genuinely interested in their ideas, they are less likely to reach for the workaround.” (7)

• Have an open discussion with your students about the ethical implications of ChatGPT and the value of authentic learning for students’ lifelong development as learners. This may include having conversations around digital literacy and bias in research and scholarship, as AI writing cowtools like ChatGPT are limited to the public source material they have access to on the internet.Don’t feel you have to have all of the answers, as this is a continually evolving issue. (6)

Assignment design:

• Ask students to reference and/or cite class materials, notes, and sources (particularly sources that are behind firewalls such as JSTOR articles) in their written assignments. This instruction is valuable because ChatGPT draws on text models from public websites.

• Require students to reflect more deeply and critically on course topics. This tip is always a good assessment strategy and ChatGPT currently performs better on more superficial and less detailed responses.” (8)

• Use in-class time for students to demonstrate knowledge and understanding in a variety of ways through low-tech, low stakes in-person activities like freewriting and live presentations.

• Craft an assignment where you generate a ChatGPT output based on a prompt and ask your students to critique the response, indicating where it did a good job of articulating key points and what nuances it missed. (For 10 other ways to creatively use ChatGPT in course assignments, see “Update your course syllabus for ChatGPT”; keep in mind that asking students to engage with ChatGPT may generate privacy concerns, so it may be better practice to provide them with a copy of ChatGPT responses that they can use.)

• Focus on critical skills that artificial intelligence struggles with. NPR education correspondent Anya Kamanetz describes three of these areas as:

  • Give a hug: empathy, collaboration, communication, and leadership skills;

  • Solve a mystery: generating questions and problem finding; and

  • Tell a story: finding what's relevant in a sea of data or applying values, ethics, morals, or aesthetic principles to a situation. (9)

• Carefully scaffold assignments with time and space for students to complete each step along the way, and consider whether the number of time-intensive tasks might require more bandwidth than students have to spend. Students are more likely to utilize a tool like ChatGPT when they are short on time. (6)

• Treat ChatGPT as a tool that some students may want to use to help get started writing. For example, students who have difficulty starting writing assignments might be encouraged to generate a paragraph with ChatGPT as a stub that enables them to continue writing. As long as the student ultimately adds significant new material and thoroughly edits or ultimately eliminates the output from ChatGPT, they are producing a document that reflects their own work.

Classroom Climate:

One way to help encourage students to make better decisions about using cowtools such as ChatGPT is to design your classroom climate to engender mastery approaches to learning, which involve a focus on deeply understanding the knowledge and skills rather than simply achieving a particular score on an assessment. In a mastery-oriented classroom, students are more likely to engage in strategies that will help them truly learn the material rather than for the goal of performing a task and receiving a grade for their work.

Three simple tips for encouraging mastery approaches in higher education classrooms include:

1. offering flexible evaluation design: consider providing opportunities for students to revise and redo specific portions of assignments;

2. focusing feedback on process and effort: offer feedback oriented toward student effort and their learning processes rather than on high grades and performance relative to others. When possible offer elaborative feedback rather than feedback based simply on correctness.

3. building a sense of belonging: discuss, emphasize, and model that making errors and mistakes is part of everyone's learning processes rather than something that only poor performers or people who "don't get it" do