ChatGPT Can Get Good Grades. What Should Educators Do about It?

With its ability to pump out confident, humanlike prose almost instantaneously, ChatGPT is a valuable cheating tool for students who want to outsource their writing assignments. When fed a homework or test question from a college-level course, the generative artificial intelligence program is liable to be graded just as highly, if not better, than a college student, according to a new study published on Thursday in Scientific Reports. With no reliable tools for distinguishing AI content from human work, educators will have to rethink how they structure their courses and assess students—and what humans might lose if we never learn how to write for ourselves.

In the new research, computer scientists and other academics compiled 233 student assessment questions from 32 professors who taught across eight different disciplines at New York University Abu Dhabi. Then they gathered three randomly selected student answers to those questions from each professor and also generated three different answers from ChatGPT. Trained subject graders, blind to the circumstances of the study,…