Response to the ubiquity of generative AI on college campuses must include rearticulation of both institutional and personal purpose. Justin Wolpers’ excellent webinar laid out the problem in stark terms. Nearly all college students use GPT for some of their college work. They are really good at using it and will get amazingly better. We label, rightly, much of this activity as cheating albeit hard to detect cheating. It is cheating because it lies at cross purposes to university educational goals. Universities have managed previous disruptive technologies through introspection, co-option, goal review and goal change. This should and will happen again. I will contend here that emphasizing our personal purpose in our classes can help suppress student’s casual use of GPT.
Substantial assignments and midterm tests and final exams are given so that students can demonstrate what they, as individuals, have learned. Homework assignments are designed to develop student learning. Learning is hard. Students, in my experience, will take great measures to avoid putting in the work. GPT gives them a new way to simulate thinking and learning with very little effort and very little chance of detection. A young person has many temptations – many opportunities to become skilled in nonacademic areas (video games, socializing, mountain biking, …), opportunities to work more hours, opportunities to enjoy mind-altering substances. From an immediate gratification standpoint, the choice is obvious. “In the long run” arguments for learning haven’t been persuasive in the past and won’t be today. Students are acting naturally and rationally.
Justin Wolpers’ solution, admittedly temporary, is to make using GPT harder than doing the actual learning work. He suggests limiting the copy/paste function, formulating questions that are more difficult for AI to answer – multiple choice instead of true/false, using more diagrams and having answers requiring diagrams, for example. My addition to the list is “Make the Course Personal.” Couching your assignments and tests as responses to what has happened in class and on homework and quizzes and tests on a granular level would make using GPT harder than doing the actual work of learning. To do this, we need to revisit our individual purpose and ask, “Why is this particular individual standing in front of these particular students in this particular course?” The more the instructor’s and student’s individual humanity is expressed in a course, the less that supreme amalgamator of human thinking, GPT, will be able to deceive us.
I therefore suggest something along the lines of the following first day speech. After some type of student-introduce-yourself activity, I might start as follows.
“I would like to talk about how this class will go – the expectations and the rules. I will try to relate these rules and expectations to university, department and my personal goals for this class. The intention of this class is to change your brain. That is what learning does. It makes physical changes to your brain. This class was approved by the university because it fits with the learning goals it has for its students. The goals were approved by a formal process that included students. Why have these learning goals? Because the university believes that, on the average, you will have more interesting, remunerative and responsible jobs and be able to make better decisions throughout your life with those learned skills and attitudes. Many of you are receiving financial support to be here. Society is paying for you to learn because it thinks college educated individuals improve society. The department has thought through specific learning goals for this class and reviews them periodically and of course you will be hearing my individual take on those goals.
“This means that I have an obligation to maintain the integrity of this class – to be sure that your individual brains have changed by the end of this class. I certify this by the grades I submit at the end of the term. These grades will be based on the evidence of learning that you provide. For example, we will have three “midterm” tests. These tests exist to help you assess how well you have learned the material and in partial consequence how well your learning methods are working. The lowest test will be dropped. You will also have the opportunity to improve your grade by ten percent by correcting the problems you have missed. The graded tests will for the most part only be marked correct or incorrect since you will learn more by discovering your errors with help from me or your classmates or your text or whatever. The two tests will count for 40% of your grade. Also, the tests will be open notes. For those of you in physical class, you can find a pile of bound notebooks in the front of the classroom that you can take and use (one to a customer). For those of you at home, when you take the test you will not have access to the class website so be sure to take extensive notes for each of the weekly modules. All questions on the tests and the final will ask what date the subject of that particular question was covered in class. The questions may also ask what homework problems were similar or ask that you work the problem with the specific method that we developed in class. These questions must be answered correctly before the rest of the problem is graded. Sometimes you may be uncertain about what was the relevant class. There will be an opportunity to explain that part of your answer. We will take some open note quizzes during the semester, so you can get the hang of it. Each test will be scheduled for a two-hour block of time. When you signed up for this class, you pledged that you would be available for those three two-hour blocks and a three-hour block for the final as described in the schedule. The tests will be designed so that a B student can finish in 70 minutes and the final so that a B student with average typing skills can finish in two hours.
“The final exam will be summative. It is designed for you to show that you are leaving with learning objectives imbedded in your brain. It will be open notes with the same format as the tests. It will be worth 40% of your grade. A spreadsheet with your currently estimated class grade will be periodically available.
“The remaining 20% of your grade will be based on class participation, quizzes and homework. These specific exercises are designed to help you learn the material and the 20% of the grade is the incentive for you to do so.
“Details of all this can be found on the first-day handout. I will be available during my office hours, in person, or by Zoom, or by email, if you have any questions. I have also asked you to write me a letter that answers a few questions about yourself. That would be a good place to tell me any personal circumstances that might affect your performance in this course.”
It isn’t hard to imagine what would happen if I gave such a speech. Few students would return for the second class and few students will sign up for my course next term. The students will find another way to get credit for the course – taking it online from another school or from another instructor if possible.
I’m retired so some of the above is pie in the sky. But I have used various forms of those rules and I have supplemented my lectures with content unique and important to me. Bottom line: In a generic course with generic students generic AI will prevail.
Math Thoughts 