7 ms·

26% of students ages 13-17 are using ChatGPT to help with homework, study finds

23 points by isaacfrond 2y ago

blitzar 2y ago
74% of students ages 13-17 are lying, I find.
- isaacfrond 2y ago
  Well, I dunno. I have a 17 year old in his last year of high school. After the initial novelty wore off, I don't think ChatGpt is used much anymore, not by him at least. - You can hardly use the writing in an essay, as it is replete with listicles. You'd have to completely rewrite the stuff anyway. Moreover, he know he'll be tested on this stuff, and yeah that does seem to have an impact. - Even using ChatGpt for explaining stuff is hardly used. For sure, I use it much much more often than he does. Also here it seems that it is hardly worth it, as the ChatGpt answer will differ too much from what is expected on the test. He much prefers to study with last years' tests--and the accepted answers-- than to use ChatGpt.
  - dagw 2y ago
    You can hardly use the writing in an essay While it's not necessarily great for writing an essay from scratch, it is a pretty good editor of an essay. My daughter uses it to 'grade' all her essays before handing them in (With a prompt like "This is a 2 page essay about X for a 10th grade social studies class, what grade would it get") and then follows up with "what needs to be improved to get the essay from a B to an A". And based on what I've seen it does a pretty good job and gives quite reasonable recommendation that are appropriate for the grade and class in a question.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    Using it to explain stuff. Don't we already have books written by professionals with hopefully years of experience? And these are given out to the students... And anything in them is taken as truth for the tests... In context of school, I would think just reading the book is lot simpler than figuring right thing to ask. Ofc, there is situations like literature where asking the ai to tell about book is probably easy cheat... But you also would have wikipedia and whatever...
    - dagw 2y ago
      Don't we already have books written by professionals with hopefully years of experience? And these are given out to the students... Do you remember your school textbooks? At best you could say they were optimised for some sort of median student that prefers the 'standard' way of acquiring information. If that's not you, or you want to learn information outside the textbook you are out of luck. LLMs have the potential to be the infinitely patient teacher that will explain the things over and over in as many different ways as necessary for each student to fully understand the information. Beyond that, from about 6th grade or so we were definitely expected to start going beyond our textbooks for some assignments. Going to the school library or taking my bike to the local library to work on assignments was not uncommon.
gregoryl 2y ago
100% of the students I have been teaching (roughly 5 to 15 years old) are using chatgpt for almost everything. It's sometimes a struggle to get them to think for themselves!
- Cumpiler69 2y ago
  This is the sequel to "You better learn calculus because you won't always have a calculator in your pocket." Well I already had a calculator on my Casio watch and now I have access to an AI supercomputer my pocket. Check mate Ms. Levenstein, joke's on you. >It's sometimes a struggle to get them to think for themselves! Was it any easier/better before ChatGPT? In my generation MTV and DOOM was to blame for kids being unable to think for themselves. Before that, rock metal was to blame for perverting the youth.
  - blitzar 2y ago
    Let me tell you, back in my day ...
  - shakna 2y ago
    An LLM is not an AI supercomputer. It will regularly give you information that is false, and if you do not know the subject well, you probably won't notice how wrong it is. We are still a very long way from Star Trek's computer being able to help you out.
    - xmzx 2y ago
      A calculator will give you bad information too if you don't know how to use the tool.
      - shakna 2y ago
        A calculator won't give you bad information if you use it correctly, though. AI, will. The same prompt can generate vastly different answers. Even the codegen examples given by the AI companies themselves have flaws in them. Critical flaws, like Claude's testing rig that doesn't test what it says it does, for example. The system is inherently flawed for most purposes it is currently being used for.
meltyness 2y ago
Search and filter have been the paradigm for a while, since the book index was invented. What are the tools of thought that will help students now succeed and advance technology in 20 years? Perhaps there is a market fit for a laggard GPT. Something useful but exhibits clear errors that a student could pick up on, and so recognize the risk of blindly accepting information like this. The same issues are associated with excess reliance on traditional publications, "the armchair scientist" and so on. Maybe, trained sequentially on the curriculum like a student, or something personally orthogonal so that the bot excels where the student is known to fail, create gaps where the student is known to succeed. It seems straightforward to fine-tune in this way since the corpus is smaller. For each grade level and setting A/B/C across the 4 subjects, maybe some 300 fine-tuning?
SamPatt 2y ago
>Comfort levels with using ChatGPT for different types of assignments vary among students: 54% found that using it to research new topics, for example, was an acceptable use of the tool. But only 18% said the same for using it to write an essay. Sounds reasonable.
- ratg13 2y ago
  I know I would have loved an AI to be able to ask calculus questions to when I was that age. A lot of the lectures in the class didn't make sense to me at the time, and spent crazy amounts of time trying to teach myself from books.
  - epolanski 2y ago
    There's lots of positives in that. I feel too many people treat school as just a place you learn stuff, where in reality the most important part imho is the challenge of learning, that's what sticks. I have a degree in chemistry, I almost forgot everything about chemistry, but I have very huge advantages when it comes to learning complex topics compared to those that have the explanation handed to them. In Italy you could not fail a school year if you failed only 3 topics, so the little engineer in me figured out I could simply ignore the existence of mathematics and physics for 5 years and just do the rest. In university I had to go through calculus 1/2, complex analysis, quantum mechanics, etc, etc. So as soon as I got into calculus 1 the first semester of the first year I bought several books on the topics and just went page by page understanding and thinking about the definitions and did 100x the exercises of my class mates. By the end of it maths have never been a problem in my life. Whatever I need to learn I am now equipped with the tools to do so starting from the basics and this pays off in many aspects of my life.
  - pseudocomposer 2y ago
    Not sure how old you are, but WolframAlpha has been exactly that for a solid decade and a half. (It was a little late for while I learned calculus, but I used it for reference afterwards.) Also, I’m curious - are GPTs/LLMs actually able to provide consistently accurate explanations and solutions for calculus? They’re historically notoriously bad at even basic arithmetic and algebra, and a quick search seems to confirm them performing similarly with calculus, but I’m open to being wrong and things having improved on that front if you have some evidence. Finally, echoing the other commenter, you really shouldn’t need a GPT-type tool to do math. If you do, you arguably don’t actually understand the concepts. And I’d honestly be shocked if a LLM could break things down well enough to genuinely help someone who doesn’t understand how to do a calculus problem, having myself tutored friends who didn’t understand things back when I was in school (and using LLMs extensively for my own work). Some of the best math classes I took didn’t grade homework at all, only exams for which we only had pencil and paper (or some weighted homework as 10% or less of the final grade). But of course, if you didn’t do all the homework, you’d never pass the exams.
bhouston 2y ago
One kid of mine is 12 in Grade 7 here in Ottawa, Canada and all of her friends apparently use ChatGPT on occasion. They are not using it for everything, but they are using it at least periodically.
spicyusername 2y ago
I think society will quickly adjust. I've already updated my interview questions, teachers will update their homework assignments, etc. Eventually it'll just be another productivity tool.
- t_mann 2y ago
  Are you in the "it's just like with calculators" camp? I think there's a fundamental difference between a tool that just simplifies some very specific solution steps vs a tool that takes the literal assignment question, regardless of how "updated" or "more difficult" it is, and outputs an answer that you can probably submit without even checking for a passing grade. Watermarking, guardrailing etc. won't fundamentally fix this, there will always be access to more unfiltered models.
  - Tade0 2y ago
    You can always run your questions through an LLM and only use those which spew nonsense most of the time. Cheaters, by definition, avoid real work, so they won't be using custom models unless the stakes are sufficiently high.
    - t_mann 2y ago
      > Cheaters, by definition, avoid real work, so they won't be using custom models unless the stakes are sufficiently high. I think it's a non-sequitur, some might get more enjoyment out of tinkering with LLMs than out of whatever the assignment is asking you to do. But even if you don't believe that, it should be obvious that the ones using the tool needn't be the same as the ones putting in the work.
- itishappy 2y ago
  How have you updated your interview questions?
  - blitzar 2y ago
    Hey chatgpt, write me interview questions.
Shorel 2y ago
In my class I believe 26% of the students are NOT using ChatGPT or another LLM to cheat in their homework and exams.
caeril 2y ago
These models are far better teachers for my kids than their actual teachers. they are far more engaged, able to go down rabbit holes guided by their own curiosity, and end up learning more. I do my best to ensure they're not using these models to do their work for them, but they are invaluable teaching tools, nonetheless. Hopefully this will be one more nail in the coffin for the sprawling public education complex.
- skulk 2y ago
  Why "learn" anything when the computer just gives you the answer? The computer won't chide you for not manually gathering and reviewing sources for an essay, not understanding units in physics formulas to check your own answers, not extracting casual relationships between events by closely reading a dense text. It'll give you the answer as quickly as possible so that you can go back to viewing short videos. All the information has always been out there for students to pick it up but a vanishingly small few actually do.
Yawrehto 2y ago
By the way, of students who have heard of ChatGPT, 32 percent have used it. But more importantly, this feels like a broad thing. There's a huge difference between 'hey I have to write a paper on the Roman economy, what are some sources about that' and 'write a paper about the Roman economy'. Similarly a difference between 'crap, what's the formula for the volume of a sphere' and 'calculate the volume of a sphere with diameter 12 feet'. Personally I would rank the 'cheatiness', from less to more, as sources < formula < writing a paper/calculating. This whole study feels like it hinges on what students consider 'help', since it was self-reported. If you try to get it to help but it only turned up sources you knew, does that count as helping? If you tried but it spat out an awful paper and you got a really bad score, does that count as helping? If you wound up having to spend more time correcting its output than you would've just writing the paper, does that count as helping? It's just so variable depending on individual standards the study feels kind of worthless as an actual indicator of stuff.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
74% of students 13-17 are not using ChatGPT Expect hype and relentless marketing to continue

23 points by isaacfrond 2y ago

blitzar 2y ago

74% of students ages 13-17 are lying, I find.

isaacfrond 2y ago
Well, I dunno. I have a 17 year old in his last year of high school. After the initial novelty wore off, I don't think ChatGpt is used much anymore, not by him at least. - You can hardly use the writing in an essay, as it is replete with listicles. You'd have to completely rewrite the stuff anyway. Moreover, he know he'll be tested on this stuff, and yeah that does seem to have an impact. - Even using ChatGpt for explaining stuff is hardly used. For sure, I use it much much more often than he does. Also here it seems that it is hardly worth it, as the ChatGpt answer will differ too much from what is expected on the test. He much prefers to study with last years' tests--and the accepted answers-- than to use ChatGpt.
- dagw 2y ago
  You can hardly use the writing in an essay While it's not necessarily great for writing an essay from scratch, it is a pretty good editor of an essay. My daughter uses it to 'grade' all her essays before handing them in (With a prompt like "This is a 2 page essay about X for a 10th grade social studies class, what grade would it get") and then follows up with "what needs to be improved to get the essay from a B to an A". And based on what I've seen it does a pretty good job and gives quite reasonable recommendation that are appropriate for the grade and class in a question.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  Using it to explain stuff. Don't we already have books written by professionals with hopefully years of experience? And these are given out to the students... And anything in them is taken as truth for the tests... In context of school, I would think just reading the book is lot simpler than figuring right thing to ask. Ofc, there is situations like literature where asking the ai to tell about book is probably easy cheat... But you also would have wikipedia and whatever...
  - dagw 2y ago
    Don't we already have books written by professionals with hopefully years of experience? And these are given out to the students... Do you remember your school textbooks? At best you could say they were optimised for some sort of median student that prefers the 'standard' way of acquiring information. If that's not you, or you want to learn information outside the textbook you are out of luck. LLMs have the potential to be the infinitely patient teacher that will explain the things over and over in as many different ways as necessary for each student to fully understand the information. Beyond that, from about 6th grade or so we were definitely expected to start going beyond our textbooks for some assignments. Going to the school library or taking my bike to the local library to work on assignments was not uncommon.

gregoryl 2y ago

100% of the students I have been teaching (roughly 5 to 15 years old) are using chatgpt for almost everything. It's sometimes a struggle to get them to think for themselves!

Cumpiler69 2y ago
This is the sequel to "You better learn calculus because you won't always have a calculator in your pocket." Well I already had a calculator on my Casio watch and now I have access to an AI supercomputer my pocket. Check mate Ms. Levenstein, joke's on you. >It's sometimes a struggle to get them to think for themselves! Was it any easier/better before ChatGPT? In my generation MTV and DOOM was to blame for kids being unable to think for themselves. Before that, rock metal was to blame for perverting the youth.
- blitzar 2y ago
  Let me tell you, back in my day ...
- shakna 2y ago
  An LLM is not an AI supercomputer. It will regularly give you information that is false, and if you do not know the subject well, you probably won't notice how wrong it is. We are still a very long way from Star Trek's computer being able to help you out.
  - xmzx 2y ago
    A calculator will give you bad information too if you don't know how to use the tool.
    - shakna 2y ago
      A calculator won't give you bad information if you use it correctly, though. AI, will. The same prompt can generate vastly different answers. Even the codegen examples given by the AI companies themselves have flaws in them. Critical flaws, like Claude's testing rig that doesn't test what it says it does, for example. The system is inherently flawed for most purposes it is currently being used for.

meltyness 2y ago

Search and filter have been the paradigm for a while, since the book index was invented. What are the tools of thought that will help students now succeed and advance technology in 20 years? Perhaps there is a market fit for a laggard GPT. Something useful but exhibits clear errors that a student could pick up on, and so recognize the risk of blindly accepting information like this. The same issues are associated with excess reliance on traditional publications, "the armchair scientist" and so on. Maybe, trained sequentially on the curriculum like a student, or something personally orthogonal so that the bot excels where the student is known to fail, create gaps where the student is known to succeed. It seems straightforward to fine-tune in this way since the corpus is smaller. For each grade level and setting A/B/C across the 4 subjects, maybe some 300 fine-tuning?

SamPatt 2y ago

>Comfort levels with using ChatGPT for different types of assignments vary among students: 54% found that using it to research new topics, for example, was an acceptable use of the tool. But only 18% said the same for using it to write an essay. Sounds reasonable.

ratg13 2y ago
I know I would have loved an AI to be able to ask calculus questions to when I was that age. A lot of the lectures in the class didn't make sense to me at the time, and spent crazy amounts of time trying to teach myself from books.
- epolanski 2y ago
  There's lots of positives in that. I feel too many people treat school as just a place you learn stuff, where in reality the most important part imho is the challenge of learning, that's what sticks. I have a degree in chemistry, I almost forgot everything about chemistry, but I have very huge advantages when it comes to learning complex topics compared to those that have the explanation handed to them. In Italy you could not fail a school year if you failed only 3 topics, so the little engineer in me figured out I could simply ignore the existence of mathematics and physics for 5 years and just do the rest. In university I had to go through calculus 1/2, complex analysis, quantum mechanics, etc, etc. So as soon as I got into calculus 1 the first semester of the first year I bought several books on the topics and just went page by page understanding and thinking about the definitions and did 100x the exercises of my class mates. By the end of it maths have never been a problem in my life. Whatever I need to learn I am now equipped with the tools to do so starting from the basics and this pays off in many aspects of my life.
- pseudocomposer 2y ago
  Not sure how old you are, but WolframAlpha has been exactly that for a solid decade and a half. (It was a little late for while I learned calculus, but I used it for reference afterwards.) Also, I’m curious - are GPTs/LLMs actually able to provide consistently accurate explanations and solutions for calculus? They’re historically notoriously bad at even basic arithmetic and algebra, and a quick search seems to confirm them performing similarly with calculus, but I’m open to being wrong and things having improved on that front if you have some evidence. Finally, echoing the other commenter, you really shouldn’t need a GPT-type tool to do math. If you do, you arguably don’t actually understand the concepts. And I’d honestly be shocked if a LLM could break things down well enough to genuinely help someone who doesn’t understand how to do a calculus problem, having myself tutored friends who didn’t understand things back when I was in school (and using LLMs extensively for my own work). Some of the best math classes I took didn’t grade homework at all, only exams for which we only had pencil and paper (or some weighted homework as 10% or less of the final grade). But of course, if you didn’t do all the homework, you’d never pass the exams.

bhouston 2y ago

One kid of mine is 12 in Grade 7 here in Ottawa, Canada and all of her friends apparently use ChatGPT on occasion. They are not using it for everything, but they are using it at least periodically.

spicyusername 2y ago

I think society will quickly adjust. I've already updated my interview questions, teachers will update their homework assignments, etc. Eventually it'll just be another productivity tool.

t_mann 2y ago
Are you in the "it's just like with calculators" camp? I think there's a fundamental difference between a tool that just simplifies some very specific solution steps vs a tool that takes the literal assignment question, regardless of how "updated" or "more difficult" it is, and outputs an answer that you can probably submit without even checking for a passing grade. Watermarking, guardrailing etc. won't fundamentally fix this, there will always be access to more unfiltered models.
- Tade0 2y ago
  You can always run your questions through an LLM and only use those which spew nonsense most of the time. Cheaters, by definition, avoid real work, so they won't be using custom models unless the stakes are sufficiently high.
  - t_mann 2y ago
    > Cheaters, by definition, avoid real work, so they won't be using custom models unless the stakes are sufficiently high. I think it's a non-sequitur, some might get more enjoyment out of tinkering with LLMs than out of whatever the assignment is asking you to do. But even if you don't believe that, it should be obvious that the ones using the tool needn't be the same as the ones putting in the work.
itishappy 2y ago
How have you updated your interview questions?
- blitzar 2y ago
  Hey chatgpt, write me interview questions.

Shorel 2y ago

In my class I believe 26% of the students are NOT using ChatGPT or another LLM to cheat in their homework and exams.

caeril 2y ago

These models are far better teachers for my kids than their actual teachers. they are far more engaged, able to go down rabbit holes guided by their own curiosity, and end up learning more. I do my best to ensure they're not using these models to do their work for them, but they are invaluable teaching tools, nonetheless. Hopefully this will be one more nail in the coffin for the sprawling public education complex.

skulk 2y ago
Why "learn" anything when the computer just gives you the answer? The computer won't chide you for not manually gathering and reviewing sources for an essay, not understanding units in physics formulas to check your own answers, not extracting casual relationships between events by closely reading a dense text. It'll give you the answer as quickly as possible so that you can go back to viewing short videos. All the information has always been out there for students to pick it up but a vanishingly small few actually do.

Yawrehto 2y ago

By the way, of students who have heard of ChatGPT, 32 percent have used it. But more importantly, this feels like a broad thing. There's a huge difference between 'hey I have to write a paper on the Roman economy, what are some sources about that' and 'write a paper about the Roman economy'. Similarly a difference between 'crap, what's the formula for the volume of a sphere' and 'calculate the volume of a sphere with diameter 12 feet'. Personally I would rank the 'cheatiness', from less to more, as sources < formula < writing a paper/calculating. This whole study feels like it hinges on what students consider 'help', since it was self-reported. If you try to get it to help but it only turned up sources you knew, does that count as helping? If you tried but it spat out an awful paper and you got a really bad score, does that count as helping? If you wound up having to spend more time correcting its output than you would've just writing the paper, does that count as helping? It's just so variable depending on individual standards the study feels kind of worthless as an actual indicator of stuff.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

74% of students 13-17 are not using ChatGPT Expect hype and relentless marketing to continue