4 ms·
It seems ChatGPT should be treated the same way institutions treat plagiarism. It's fine to use LLMs for inspiration but the work you submit must be meaningfull
by dcow 4y ago
It seems ChatGPT should be treated the same way institutions treat plagiarism. It's fine to use LLMs for inspiration but the work you submit must be meaningfully your own.
Of course it's not perfect, it never will be. But ultimately it's the student that suffers when they plagiarize. Professors ought have this conversation with students at the same times they're discussing the value of learning & education. I suspect we'll build tools that match answers against the text that LLMs spit out and that will make it easy for people to detect when answers are being pasted verbatim from LLMs.
The other broader spicier thought that comes to mind is that LLMs may push the Overton Window for what's considered entry level and that's probably ultimately good tough it won't be without some sacrifice. This would mean CS departments potentially need to do a curriculum iteration to accommodate. Perhaps there are new, slightly more sophisticated, entry level problems that can be tackled where the commodity solutions haven't yet been entombed in LLMs. Maybe assessments will shift to be less about regurgitating the solution to a common problem and instead to fixing problems with some localized toy implementation or some fictitious API that LLMs won't know about.
- corbulo 4y agoIt will be a hard sell since it or similar tech has already been long embraced commercially. A bit like forcing students to use an abacus while calculators are around. The student should still be responsible for what they submit and all of its errors of course. But what should really change is our methods of assessing students. The University model for undergrads has already been long broken in need of fixing. I don't think this will significantly impact grad students yet.
- dcow 4y ago> A bit like forcing students to use an abacus while calculators are around. I said allow students to use ChatGPT. Just make it clear that pasting answers from it verbatim, just like doing so from SO, is called plagiarism and does not benefit the academic community or themselves. There will always be cheats. Agree about shifting evaluation methods.
- gattilorenz 4y ago> A bit like forcing students to use an abacus while calculators are around. But... we do that already. We ask students not to use calculators, or not to use scientific calculators, during exercises, exams, etc. And it's not because we want to impose an extra load on them, but because we think that by not using calculators you learn to deal with numbers, you build a strong foundation for thinking about math, quantities, etc. But since we're talking about essays and coding assignments that are graded, one of the objection is that they should not be graded, because the goal is to use them for learning. Sure, at the university, the ideal scenario is that students are there to learn and will do assignments even when they are not graded. That happens, but it's for a minority of them, because (understandably) the university is also a time for parties, relationships, etc, and students are young... In practice, many assignments are graded mostly to make sure the students do them, learn from them, and pass the course (maybe a patronizing approach, but in the end, if only 10% of the students pass, the teacher won't have an easy life with his/her superiors - but that's another story).
- dinkumthinkum 4y agoLearning is different from commercial work. Ironically, it takes learning yo realize that.