UNR Profs Adjust to Teaching with ChatGPT and Redefine Ethics in the Age of AI
Charlotte Italiano, Emma Aguero, and Sydney Peerman report on UNR faculty’s hot take on the ever-growing use of ChatGPT and artificial intelligence by students.
A student types “Chat GPT” into the search bar and within milliseconds, “Introducing ChatGPT” appears. Hesitantly they click on the link. Fingers hovering over the keyboard, the student asks the AI generator robot; “Write an essay about media during the Industrial Revolution,” and “Can you explain this math problem?” The robot delivers and the student now has a leg up to complete their homework.
Across the country, educational institutions are still understanding how to regulate student use of ChatGPT. In some cases it’s been a hard no, such as in February when the Department of Education in New York City banned the use of ChatGPT in its public schools.
The University of Nevada, Reno’s faculty is taking a different approach so far, striving to promote ethical student use of ChatGPT.
As indicated in a late April email, UNR put together a Technology Committee group to enable faculty to learn and discuss academic integrity about ChatGPT and other AI technologies.
Kathy Hanselman, the Assistant Director of Instructional Design and Education Technology, is excited about the use of the software by students but acknowledges that the technology is not perfect.
She suggests that Chat GPT is a program that students can use as a study aid to help solidify their learnings or to explain new concepts.
Her goal is to inform UNR faculty on how to teach students to use ChatGPT effectively and ethically. She said it’s important to focus on changing the dialogue from trying to catch the student to instead working with the student to use it as a tool.
“The idea that we are focusing on now is helping students understand that this tool exists, it’s fun, it’s a great way to kind of get ideas and get started and have things explained to you in different ways, but it’s not 100% trustworthy,” she said.
Students using ChatGPT
Students at the University of Nevada, Reno have begun to implement ChatGPT as a resource for their studies, with many quickly becoming aware of the software’s unreliability.
In a Reddit post asking UNR students if they use ChatGPT and other AI for assignments, Redditor WolfyYoung answered: “It is excellent for pulling references from books, getting a summary of people/things. It is horrible at math but can do about 80% of word problems. Also has about an 80% accuracy with geology stuff, but can summarize chapters of textbooks on the flipside. It’s very good at coding.”
With students experimenting with ChatGPT it has allowed them to find effective study methods, as UNR faculty continue to learn about the program themselves and how to detect it.
“I had a TA tell me last week that they were 99% sure one of the lab reports submitted was written by ChatGPT. Saw a TikTok this morning about a professor warning his kids that turnitin.com now has an app that checks GPT similarities,” said another commentor with the user name DiShep.
ChaptGPT Explained
What is ChatGPT again?
Launched in November 2022, ChatGPT has been a fast-progressing Artificial Intelligence program designed to have human-like conversations with those who use it.
ChatGPT, also known as Generative Pre-trained Transformer, takes large amounts of what they call the purpose of data and detects patterns within speech, said UNR Assistant Professor of Information Systems, Alan Yang.
Yang has done research on mobile computing and healthcare information systems to improve learning techniques in the classroom.
According to Yang, the ChatGPT 3.5 model pulls from data between 2019 and 2020. The newest model, ChatGPT 4, is able to dig through more up-to-date information to generate answers from the user prompts.
The software searches the internet for outliers and patterns to create an algorithm to complete sentences. This allows students to generate ideas, pull facts and develop ideas for schoolwork.
“I’m not completely against using ChatGPT as a tool, because it helps to save time. It would be as if I said, you can’t use a calculator to do math. It’s very helpful and useful,” Yang said.
Yang mentions that using ChatGPT does bring ethical implications; some students can take advantage of the program and claim they generated the answers on their own, he said.
“Even though it’s not a human that you’re copy-pasting from, it’s not your work. When they pass it off as their own it is disingenuous, and, I think, is considered a breach of ethics,” Yang said.
ChatGPT in the Classroom
UNR faculty are keeping an open mind when dealing with ChatGPT and educating students about ethics and plagiarism.
Professor of Journalism Caesar Andrews accepts the sudden development of ChatGPT technology and wants to give students the opportunity to utilize it.
“I don’t have a fundamental problem with students making use of it. But I just want a note at the bottom of an assignment that says, ‘I used Chat GPT,’ and then I want to know how that student used it,” said Andrews.
Andrews mentioned that he knows it will be used anyway, as students are often far ahead of professors when it comes to technology, so he suggested instead of prohibiting its use in his classes, he wants to learn more about it.
As the journalism school Chair of Media Ethics Andrews does consider directly copying and pasting work from ChatGPT as a form of plagiarism.
“In the end, you are presenting something as if it’s yours that you didn’t originate, ” he said.
As finals for the semester of Spring 2023 roll around, students are continuing to experiment with Chat GPT, in some cases realizing the application is not as foolproof as they initially thought.
Copying and pasting quiz answers into the chat box does not always provide correct results and essays written by ChatGPT can be very vague and repetitive in nature.
As UNR faculty work to set standards and students use the application more, ways to use Chat GPT ethically are being figured out continuously. The use of the application as a tool for studying and increasing understanding could change the way it is perceived in educational institutions and in the end prevent all plagiarism.
