ChatGPT-Proofing Your Assignments

By Lon W. Schiffbauer, BA, MBA, PhD, SPHR

Get ready for your inbox to be flooded with remarkably well-written essays in 2023, all courtesy of OpenAI and ChatGPT. That’s right. Your students are going to outsource their homework to artificial intelligence—and you’ll have no way of knowing that they did.

This isn’t future science fiction; this is now.

First, let’s look at what we’re up against. ChatGPT is a variant of the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) language model developed by OpenAI. It is designed specifically for conversation and chatbot applications. ChatGPT is trained on a large dataset of human-to-human conversations and is able to generate human-like responses to a given input. It is able to generate responses that are coherent and relevant to the context of the conversation. It has been used in a variety of applications, including customer service chatbots, virtual assistants, and online language translation.

Now if you’re wondering how I know so much about ChatGPT, such that I was able to summarize it in a short paragraph, I don’t. I simply typed “write a 100-word essay explaining what ChatGPT is” and this is what I got, more or less.

In a recent video essay published by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ, 2022), journalist Joanna Stern returned to high school and submitted a ChatGPT-generated essay to see if it could pass muster with the teacher. As it turns out, while the paper was not top notch, it was good enough to earn a passing grade. (And if you’re thinking the assignment must have been some simplistic definition-driven thing, it wasn’t. It asked students to situate the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as an existentialist text while drawing thematic parallels between the film and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.)

According to Daniel Herman (2022) in The Atlantic, himself an author and high-school English teacher, the quality of the content produced by ChatGPT gives him pause:

“Let me be candid (with apologies to all of my current and former students): What GPT can produce right now is better than the large majority of writing seen by your average teacher or professor. Over the past few days, I’ve given it a number of different prompts. And even if the bot’s results don’t exactly give you goosebumps, they do a more-than-adequate job of fulfilling a task.”

(I recommend going to his article and reading the output ChatGPT generated to Herman’s input “Explain the Madhyamaka Buddhist idea that all phenomena lack inherent existence, using a funny, specific example.” It’s eye-opening.)

I could go on, but you get the idea: ChatGPT is here, it’s free, it’s powerful, and oh, yeah, one more thing, it has only been around since November 30, 2022, and is getting better every day. So, this all leads me to the $64,000 question: what can you as a teacher do to help your students rely on their own brains rather than that of our robot overlords? Here are four ways you can modify your assignments to mitigate for this new technology (as well as increase student learning, which is also nice):

Require that the student include insights from in-class lecture discussions.

This does a couple things. First, as powerful as ChatGPT is, it’s no omniscient—not yet, anyway. This means that it cannot reference anything that was said or discussed in the classroom. Second, it encourages students to take notes in class so they will have something to include in their essays. This increases student engagement and retention of the material.

Require that the student include insights and quotes from your own study materials.

According to the video essay by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ, 2022), ChatGPT has a hard time referencing content that is not widely circulated on the Internet. For example, I have published a great deal on goal-setting and productivity, but when I type in “write a 100-word essay on goal-setting and productivity according to Lon Schiffbauer” it has no idea who I am. (Oh the sting!) By requiring students to include insights and quotes from your own study materials, you make it more difficult for them to skip the readings.

Require that the student connect the topic with local current events.

Similar to works not widely circulated on the Internet, ChatGPT has no real way of connecting a given topic with local current events. By requiring the student to explore an idea through the lens of current events, you can circumvent ChatGPT as the primary thinker and content contributor.

Require that the student include personal examples from their own lives.

The point of this is not to stymie the student so much as it is to invite them to write about their favorite topic—themselves. If you can spark something intrinsic inside the student then they’ll be more inclined to share their own thoughts. It’s also something the AI struggles to address. I asked ChatGPT to tell me why it loved its favorite hobby, and while a student would have plenty to say on the matter, the AI fell flat on its artificial face.

No technique is fool-proof.

I fully acknowledge that even with these requirements, students can still get a fair amount—if not the bulk—of their content from ChatGPT. But—and I’m taking a chance here—is that necessarily a bad thing? Remember, the objective of an education is learning, not output. With this in mind, let’s say a student uses ChatGPT to generate an essay to serve as the foundation of their submission, but then goes through and adds insights from in-class lecture discussions, quotes from your own study materials, references to current events, and personal examples from their own lives. Doing this would require the student to read through the AI-generated essay, edit it, tweak it, rephrase it, and basically rewrite it to meet the assignment expectations. Hell, this isn’t easy. In fact, this kind of editing and rewriting is a serious skillset. And as they go about this exercise, they may just learn something about the topic about which they are “writing.” Am I saying I’m cool with this? Whether I am or not is moot. ChatGPT is here and students are going to use it. The question we have to ask ourselves is not how can we stop them from using it but rather how can we help them continue to learn and grow as they do.

References

Herman, D. (2022, December 16). ChatGPT Will End High-School English. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/openai-chatgpt-writing-high-school-english-essay/672412/

Wall Street Journal. (2022, December 21). Cheating With ChatGPT: Can OpenAI’s Chatbot Pass AP Lit? | WSJ [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l01biyMZjEo

Lon is an Associate Professor of Business Management at Salt Lake Community College and holds an MBA, a PhD, and is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR). In addition to his academic background, Lon spent close to 30 years working and consulting for such companies as FedEx, Intel, eBay, and PayPal, as well as a variety of small to mid-sized companies around the world.