Article: Should Teachers Allow Chatbots in Class?

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No chatting in class! Everyone knows that teachers do not allow chatting in class. Students must focus on the teacher to receive instruction, and naturally, when it comes to test taking—no talking. Tests help the teacher determine how well each student has learned the class material. Apart from open-book tests and group projects, the basis of teaching lives in the relationship between the teacher and the student. However, the complete explosion of chatbots exemplified by OpenAI's ChatGPT has inserted a new element into the student-teacher relationship. Chatbots powered by large language models excel in summarizing information, generating written text almost indistinguishable from average human writing, and answering diverse questions on a nearly infinite number of topics. If teachers worried about students using Cliff Notes to obscure the fact they did not read the assigned books for school, ChatGPT now makes it even more challenging to determine whether a pupil read and understood the text.

Given the free availability of chatbots from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and others, teachers and school administrations must now grapple with managing a tool that allows students to complete writing assignments in a few minutes that would traditionally have required hours or even days. Across the country in schools, colleges, and universities, reactions have spanned a spectrum of responses from and outright ban on the use of chatbots by students and faculty to limited use of chatbots in certain circumstances, and all the way to total acceptance of chatbots in the educational process. A survey conducted by EdWeek Research Center in February 2024 found that 75% of school districts do not ban the use of chatbots, while another 20% allow faculty to use them but not the students. The remaining of the districts banned them altogether for both students and staff. (edweek.org)

While the complete banning of chatbots for students implies that the school districts see no place for chatbots to play a role in student learning, three-quarters of school districts continue to explore how this powerful new technology can help students learn and incorporate chatbots into the way that work and learn. Professors and administrators continue to try different approaches to using chatbots at the collegiate level. Yale University offered various examples of how their faculty have used chatbots in their classrooms and laboratories. (poorvucenter.yale.edu)

In the Art History Department, Professor Edward S. Cooke, Jr, the Charles F. Montgomery Professor of American Decorative Arts in the Department of the History of Art, took an interesting approach that required the students to use a chatbot to write a label for one of the objects in the Yale art museum. Labels pose a significant challenge because they must describe the artwork in dynamic, compelling language covering the piece from the history, artist, subject matter, and materials in 150 words or less. The writing draws on many aspects of art history. The professor asked the students to provide the first draft from ChatGPT 4.0, the prompts the students used, a 150-word critique of the chatbot text, and a selfie of the student next to the piece of art featured in the piece. The professor incorporated the chatbot as a tool and challenged the students to be critical of the label to show their understanding of the artwork.

In the sciences, Assistant Professor David Moore and other faculty insist that students take advantage of chatbots to help them write computer code more efficiently and quickly, as this significantly impacts how people write it. The students may consult with the chatbots but cannot copy and paste code. They must write it themselves. In the social sciences, a lecturer at the Jackson School for Global Affairs, James Sundquist, turned the table and used Chat GPT to write the midterm exam answer to the question, "Does anarchy mean that war is inevitable?" The students then had to critique the answer provided by the chatbot. The professor felt it essential to prompt the chatbot to take a position and not simply summarize information.

Chatbots' nearly instant permeation of education since 2022 has challenged teachers and administrations to deal with such a powerful tool that can reduce the time it takes to write essays from hours to minutes. Apart from the danger of plagiarism, chatbots can help a student give the impression of comprehending the subject matter and clearly organizing their thoughts through writing on the subject—the very essence of learning. Some school districts try to avoid this problem throughout the rite by banning chatbots, but others realize this powerful new tool will now occupy a permanent place in future schools and workplaces. Seeing the future, some educators have encouragingly embraced the technology and have found other ways to challenge students and see what they have learned.

Dr. Smith’s career in scientific and information research spans the areas of bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, toxicology, and chemistry. He has published a number of peer-reviewed scientific papers. He has worked over the past seventeen years developing advanced analytics, machine learning, and knowledge management tools to enable research and support high-level decision making. Tim completed his Ph.D. in Toxicology at Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of Washington.

You can buy his book on Amazon in paperback and in kindle format here.