I’m Tim Gorichanaz, and this is Ports, a newsletter about design and ethics. This is a special post for paid subscribers only: how teachers ought to respond to ChatGPT.
While the rest of the world is grappling with fears of job loss, economic revolution and apocalypse (however overblown) since the release of ChatGPT in November, the teachers of the world seem to be primarily concerned with cheating.
Okay, I’m being a little facetious. But if you look at the articles about ChatGPT in the world of teaching, you’d come to the same conclusion.
These worries are valid. A survey from January, about two months after ChatGPT’s release, showed that about 90% of students had used ChatGPT to help with homework, half used it for an at-home test or quiz, half used it to write an essay, and about one-quarter used it to create an outline for a paper. And at the same time, over 70% of students believed the program should be banned at their institution.
So teachers are, naturally, trying to do something about this.
Cheating, of course, is as old as school. It’s not a new thing for teachers to have to deal with. And I think the lessons learned about cheating in prior eras can show us teachers the way forward in the age of ChatGPT.
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