AI challenges pedagogy, learning assessments

Imagine that your teacher gives you a tough essay to submit. You type in the keywords in a chat box, and in seconds, a beautifully written essay is ready. The best part is that the teacher won’t even know that it is plagiarised as the essay is tailor-made for you!

We are talking about artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots like ChatGPT. What makes ChatGPT different from the numerous other AI-powered content generators out there on the market? First, it is free and user-friendly. Second, the content that you get is top quality, with facts and figures. It can structure content in whichever way you want, be it a poem, an essay, or even codes; consider it done. To give a flavour of what it can do, here are the first two stanzas of a poem written by chatGPT on Covid-19:

‘Covid 19, a virus unknown/ Spread across the world, leaving us alone / In quarantine we stay, inside our homes / Hoping and praying, for a cure to be shown. Every day brings new cases, new deaths / Families torn apart, with their last breaths / Doctors and nurses, working around the clock / Trying to save lives, with all their might and pluck ’

The bot is still learning, and it admits its flaws. Critics have shown that the chatbot is not always 100% right. For example, it can give you biassed opinions on sensitive issues. All it gives you is the information already available on the internet, processed elegantly, and customised in the way you want. Hence, the flaws inherent to the source information would be more
or less present in the final output. The fact that it is still learning and developing means addressing these issues is just a matter
of time.

AI has finally evolved to the point where it not only supplants jobs but also mars human imagination and creativity. The latest addition to this list is academic rigour. AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT defy the existing frameworks in place to measure academic rigour in higher education. Setting aside the superficial learning that may happen, it does nothing to improve our students’ creativity, imagination, or writing skills. On a different note, let’s say that it reduces the burden on the students to look up hundreds of sources to write a paragraph. And one can argue that this is exactly what technology does; it makes life easier.

We cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that technology has revolutionized higher education for the better. There was a time when calculators were not allowed in the exam halls. We have now shifted to the era of open-book and online exams. The change here is in terms of what gets assessed and how it gets assessed. Prof. Darren Hick from Furman University, who caught a student cheating using ChatGPT, commented that “Academia did not see this coming. So we’re sort of blindsided by it.”

As academia embraces technology, what’s the point of arguing that this is a bolt from the blue? The larger question that needs to be addressed here is how we will put this chatbot to use. Is it to replace the original thoughts of our students or to supplement them? The sad fact is that, if we don’t acknowledge and respond now, it may not just be assignments but even doctoral theses that would be handed in using the content generated by these AI brains. At best, what the current system suggests is a plagiarism check, which wouldn’t be effective at all.

There has never been a better time to reflect on the existing learning assessment methods in the higher education system. One way is to integrate activities involving chatbots into the course plans. It needs to be a customised integration based on the nature of the streams. For example, in social science subjects like economics, students could be asked to use chatbots to generate content that would resolve a policy dilemma. The task for the students would be to evaluate those policy options based on the theories they learned in the course. Another method that could be effective but is practically arduous is to keep the compulsory viva component with the submissions.

The immediate response should be to make the stakeholders aware of the situation and organise academic integrity campaigns. The long-term plan should be a phased integration of AI into the curriculum and a shift from pedagogy and andragogy to heutagogy, or more student-centered and student-led instructional strategies.

(The writer is with TAPMI, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal.)