By Minnie Stephenson

About 20 years ago, University of Maryland English professor Mark Forrester held an in-class exam for the course introduction to poetry. The exam was held in a classroom in Tydings Hall with little to no WiFi. Before the exam, he agreed to let some students, who were non-native speakers, bring in a Chinese-English dictionary. When the students arrived for the exam, they did not bring in books. They brought electronic tablets.

Forrester was a bit bewildered, but decided to let the students use the electronic dictionaries for the exam because he trusted the students not to use them to cheat.

“My approach is to trust students until they make it impossible for me to trust them,” Forrester said.

Forrester has been teaching at this university for over 25 years. He has seen many waves of new technology make their way into the classroom. ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot, has recently hit the scene, already stirring up controversy for its impressive, yet unsettling, AI technology.

The chatbot was created by the company OpenAI and launched in November 2022, picking up speed ever since. The chatbot is popular because of its ability to answer questions in a human-like way and produce content such as poems or essays on famous novels.

Forrester remembers when he was a student, handheld calculators were becoming more popular.

“I’m very old,” he said in a raspy voice one can only develop after 25 years of teaching.

Many teachers back then thought students would use the calculators to cheat and tried to ban them, but other teachers thought differently.

“Other math teachers tried to figure out, OK, how can we use this? How can we incorporate this technology? Because they saw it primarily as a tool,” Forrester said.

Similarly, professors have debated how ChatGPT fits into the classroom. Forrester thinks it has its benefits.

Forrester is working on a lesson plan about ChatGPT and how students can use it to their advantage. It can be used as a starting point for finding sources for research or editing, he said.

“I don’t want the students to learn to rely on it for their critical thinking in their writing,” Forrester said. “It should be a tool to help them do those things better.”

ChatGPT can be just as prevalent an issue in STEM classes, but Swarna Mohan, who teaches a course on principles of molecular and cellular biology, isn’t incorporating ChatGPT into her course nor combatting it.

Mohan has been teaching for about a decade, starting out at Carnegie Mellon University and then the University of California San Diego before coming to Maryland. Advanced technology has been a factor throughout her whole teaching career, and she knows how to handle it.

The only written components in her course are the lab reports, which are based on very specific scenarios. Because of this, ChatGPT would not be very helpful, she said.

“I’m not that worried about it,” Mohan said. “Based on trying it out a little bit, we can see that just having ChatGPT write something, without the students then going in and modifying it more on their own, won’t give them something that will result in a good grade for the assignment.”

Mohan knows that cheating is nothing new — she deals with it about every semester. She already has all written work go through Turnitin, a popular online plagiarism detection service, before it is submitted.

While Mohan’s course isn’t changing, other professors can’t say the same. One professor’s solution for ChatGPT? Get rid of homework.

Ṣebnem Kalemli-Özcan is the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics and Finance at this university, where she teaches an undergraduate course on globalization of capital markets.

Before ChatGPT was introduced, she wasn’t worried about academic dishonesty, and she rarely caught students in the act.

“Economics is not English. It’s not easy to find answers to problems in different places, so you pretty much have to sit down and solve things,” she said.

When ChatGPT was announced on the news, Kalemli-Özcan decided to try it out herself, and plugged some of her homework questions into the chat bot.

“It gave me very nice answers in like, less than a minute,” she said.

This semester, in-class oral exams have taken the place of the problem sets she once assigned for homework. This change, made solely because of ChatGPT, is actually benefiting the students in ways she didn’t expect.

“I am becoming a huge fan of these oral exams,” she said. “It helps students to review things right away … It’s leading to a better learning outcome.”

When asked if students’ overall grades have improved because of the change, she chuckled.

“We’ll see, my midterm is this week,” she said.

Whether professors decide to change their course because of ChatGPT or not, it is here to stay.

“AI is gonna be here with us from now on, and it’s only gonna get better,” Forrester said. “It’s probably gotten better since we started this conversation.”

Featured Image: Photo by Malachi Brooks on Unsplash