Ensure that the work your students are submitting is their own.
Unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between original work, plagiarized work, and work authored by others — including artificial intelligence (AI). The rise of ghostwriting services, cheating websites, and now accessible GPT has made it more difficult to assess the authenticity of a student’s work.
Let’s take a moment and talk about what ChatGPT is, why authorship is important, and how to maintain an authorship focus in your classroom.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a tool that uses natural language processing (NLP) to author written work. It is an AI designed to write for a person, doing the thought-work for them, and create passable text for work and life.
What is Authorship and Why Is It Important?
Authorship is the process of writing, the choices one makes when writing, and the editing discussions one has with themselves. It is an important part of the academic journey and is seen as a cornerstone to creating reflective thought in the learner. By verifying authorship, teachers can ensure that their students are not plagiarizing, hiring ghostwriters, or otherwise cheating.
Beyond learning, authorship is important to protect intellectual property rights. When instructors verify authorship, they ensure the work is protected from being used without the author’s permission.
How to Use ChatGPT in the Classroom
ChatGPT and other GPT tools are not without merit! They can help students start assignments, like by giving writing stems. An instructor who uses a GPT created writing in an analytical way can ask students to examine and correct the AI’s output — catching the mistakes and discussing nuance builds the student’s “grey matter” understanding of the topic.
GPT is a useful tool, and should be used as a tool that benefits the student.
Benefits of Authorship for Students
In addition to protecting intellectual property rights, authorship also benefits students. By verifying authorship, the student demonstrates their work is original and that they will get credit for it.
Authorship is beneficial to student learning. By authoring the assignment, the student demonstrates to the instructor that they are actually learning the material. The instructor comments on the work, creating a feedback loop that honors the purpose of academic honesty, and in turn helps the student to become more engaged and motivated to learn.
Using Auth+ to Detect Authorship
Auth+ is a tool designed to help teachers detect authorship in student work. It uses natural language processing (NLP) to analyze the text for patterns, style, and structure, compare it to other sources, and asks the student questions tailored from their writing.
Auth+ is used to detect plagiarism, ghostwriting, and other forms of cheating in student work. It’s purpose is to ensure that student work is original thought from the student and not created by other sources.
Best Practices for Using ChatGPT
Using ChatGPT in the classroom is a great way to add robust critical thinking to your classroom. Anna Mills, English professor at the City College of San Francisco, is leading a discussion on AI Text Generators and Teaching Writing and has great ideas. These ideas for using ChatGPT in the classroom have been influenced by her work and conversations with others:
- Ask students to answer a question using ChatGPT. Have them critique the answer.
- Use ChatGPT to create a source of information. Have students read 2-3 peer-reviewed resources along with the ChatGPT source. Ask the student to detect which writing was from the AI.
- Ask students to summarize an article, then have them use ChatGPT to summarize the same article. Follow-up with questions regarding similarities and differences between the 2.
Take-away
ChatGPT is a powerful tool that can help instructors ensure that their students are grappling with the material in novel ways. Student needs to author their work to realize the benefits of authorship, Auth+ can verify that student work is original and not copied from other sources.
What do you think?
Am I off base or completely wrong?? Leave a comment below to let us know your thoughts.