Students Are Going to Use Generative Algorithms, so Let’s Make Sure They Do So Properly

A study conducted by the creators of the leading plagiarism detection service, Turnitin, claims that over the past year, students turned in more than 22 million essays written with the help of generative tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and others as original work, a trend some say spells the end of civilization as we know it.

I have never trusted tools like Turnitin, and as a teacher, moreover, I can only disagree and question the conclusions of the report. From the first time, in late November 2022, when I tested ChatGPT, I immediately understood that such an innovation was going to change education, but not necessarily destroy it. In fact, as an educator, I am worried by professors or institutions who are eager to ban such tools and try to detect them at all costs rather than keeping an open mind and transparently allowing their use. At this point, I am seriously concerned if professors don’t know how to use ChatGPT better than their students.

Firstly, as a matter of principle: if a tool is able to give my students a competitive advantage when writing an essay or creating a presentation, my aim as a teacher is not that they avoid it at the risk of being accused of copying, but that they make the best possible use of it.

Secondly, because all tools that attempt to detect documents written using generative algorithms fail a lot, and generate enough false positives to risk wrongly reporting a student for plagiarism, in many cases with the student’s future at stake.

To work on the basis that students will always cheat is to misunderstand the real purpose of education. For example, many of my students speak English as a second language: is it really a problem for them to use a generative assistant to ensure that their work is correctly written? The readability of their papers has improved tremendously, and frankly, I’m fine with that, because before I felt I was largely wasting my time by correcting their writing or typos instead of focusing on their content. For Turnitin and the like, I’m sure that those papers that were “legitimately” written by students typing on their computers and then were simply run through ChatGPT to check grammar and spelling are part of those alleged twenty-two million papers it labels as “plagiarized”.

Should students spend hours researching and writing, when they can simply feed the algorithm with the right data and questions and get answers quickly? The important thing for me is not whether they write by tapping their fingers on the keyboard or not, but that once they get a result, they are able to understand that what they should do is not just copy and paste it, but read it carefully and take the time to correct what needs to be corrected… which by the way, is a very good way to reinforce learning. And in any case, much better from a didactic point of view than what some people used to do, which was to pay a bright student from India, Kenya or other English-speaking countries to write the paper for them.

What I want is for students to understand that when used properly, a generative algorithm may reduce writing time, but it will always increase how long they spend on revision. That is why, in addition to encouraging them to use generative algorithms, I ask them to include the query they have made, with its corresponding prompt, as a reference, which allows me to assess whether or not they have made correct use of the tool. In practice, I am more inclined to fail a student who makes a simple prompt and then unquestioningly accepts what the algorithm says, rather than one who used it correctly. Education is not always about evaluating the end or the result obtained; many times we must learn to evaluate the means.

That said, we cannot accept a situation whereby students include serious errors in their work “because ChatGPT said so”. If they use the tool incorrectly, if they think it is some sort of infallible oracle or if they use it carte blanche, they are simply showing that they have not learned anything and do not know how to use these tools.

Let’s be clear, our students are for sure going to use ChatGPT and similar tools. What would we prefer, that they hide this by changing the wording, or even introducing typos on purpose, to make it “look” like they wrote it? Surely that’s the wrong approach? Instead, let’s allow them use new tools in the same way they learned to use calculators, spreadsheets, Wikipedia or search engines, and focus on teaching them how to learn and create good work with all the tools that technology puts at their disposal.

(En español, aquí)

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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