First the article says ChatGPT can “[write] highly detailed essays”. I’ve asked ChatGPT to write me an essay on various topics I’ve written in my college experi

First the article says ChatGPT can “[write] highly detailed essays”. I’ve asked ChatGPT to write me an essay on various topics I’ve written in my college experience and the best I can get out of it is generalized and highly cursory text on the subject. Something more akin to the introduction or summary section of a real college-level paper. Perhaps that is sufficient at k12 levels. I was not impressed. Also no citations and without that I cannot trust anything it outputs. A few times it has spewed incorrect information. Long term ChatGPT will need to be trained on high integrity data- I.e. primary sources. My generalized experience of k-12 and undergrad in the U.S is most coursework (think papers, homework, and standardize tests) are looking for how well you can process information from disparate sources (textbooks, lectures, primary/secondary sources, etc.), memorize and regurgitate it with some slight application of logic. Using the 80-20 rule as an analogy assignments at these levels are 80% memorization and 20% applying logic. ChatGPT has unlimited memory, can read anything and regurgitate what it has consumed. So no surprise it can pass standardized tested and write essays. When I entered graduate school assignments became 20% regurgitation and 80% problem solving. And I don’t think ChatGPT cannot excel here at the moment. If it is then the question being asked must of been common enough to appear in training texts. How often do exam questions get changes year-to-year and how much are they changed? My mother is a k12 teacher in the U.S. What I’ve gathered from perusing her teaching materials is that coursework is being used to ensure that students have consumed the required materials and evaluate how well they do this. Effectively they need written evidence teaching is taking place in the classroom. Of course ChatGPT enables students no not learn the material. Tech does have its place in the classroom, and paper/pencil is not the solution. There needs to be a cultural shift in how we teach in classrooms, the coursework and how we “grade” students ability to learn. I can understand why some subjects like history are paper heavy. I don’t know if a creative coursework approach that can evade ChatGPT effectiveness. Perhaps this is the start of college becoming harder where coursework will ask about things not commonly researched which is traditionally what a PhD is for. For math and science it seems to me like projects that require application of a large knowledge area might be the go to approach. For example, in math if you’re learning about linear equation optimization you could ask students to develop an algorithm. I ChatGPT was not successful in doing that.