ChatGPT: Great for chatting, not so great for cheating [Students, School, & Chatbots]
During a recent tutoring session, I noticed that my student, Ben, seemed unusually disturbed by his classwork. Ben is your typical enthusiastic and athletic student, so his prolonged discontent piqued my interest. As an experienced educator, I'm used to students complaining about schoolwork and teachers, but this seemed different.
When I asked what was bothering him, he immediately voiced his frustration over his school’s ban on ChatGPT, arguing that those who wish to cheat will find ways to do so regardless. To his surprise, I told him to switch to screen sharing and launch ChatGPT. I watched as he copied and pasted the following question into the prompt:
"A bacteria culture starts with 90 bacteria. The culture grows exponentially, such that two hours later, there are 1290 bacteria. Use the model to predict the number of bacteria after 5 days."
We were impressed by ChatGPT's methodical approach, so we decided to cross-reference the answer by prompting Bard. The answers did not match and now Ben was curious to find out which one was incorrect. Turns out, both tools provided a wrong answer, and Ben was able to pinpoint the errors in both solutions.
I acknowledged that the errors were arithmetic in nature and that they might have been avoided had we integrated math plugins with our chatbots. We were intrigued to see how the bots would fare when faced with more complex queries. We put the following question to test:
"We are farming bacteria in a petri dish. We start with a bacteria culture of 20 bacteria, which grows at a rate of 1.7% per day. After 5 days, we introduce a second bacteria culture with an initial population of 45 bacteria. This culture grows continuously at a rate of 2.3% per day. How many days will it take for the total bacteria count to reach 300? Additionally, how many bacteria will there be in each group?"
Despite sounding knowledgeable and delivering step-by-step responses, ChatGPT made multiple logical and arithmetic errors. I encouraged my student to break the problem down into its necessary steps and to lead ChatGPT with suitable prompts until it found the correct answer. This exercise was a great learning opportunity for strengthening questioning and developing critical thinking abilities.
Concerns about ChatGPT being utilized for cheating do not overly worry me. Students already have access to numerous resources, such as web searches or commercial homework solvers, and ChatGPT is no different. As an educator, my main concern is the bans imposed by schools. ChatGPT and other generative AI tools are here to stay, and it is our responsibility to teach students how to use the tools for their intended use: as chatbots, not cheatbots.
In the next post, we will explore how ChatGPT performs when confronted with previously unseen questions, further highlighting its capabilities and limitations.
