ChatGPT and artificial intelligence forces educators to rethink assessments | The Canberra Times | Canberra, ACT

Educators are still coming to grips with how ChatGPT will fundamentally reshape education by providing more opportunities to personalise learning – and more temptation for students to cheat on their assessments.

This generative artificial intelligence has been in development for a while but it has suddenly burst onto the public consciousness with the launch of ChatGPT on November 30.

Associate professor in University of Canberra’s school of information technology and systems, Dr Abu Barkat ullah, believes the emerging technology has great potential in education, with the appropriate regulations in place.

“Of course, we are concerned about academic integrity here at the university, as every university would be, because it goes to the quality of our degrees and our graduates,” Professor Crisp said.

“The use of artificial intelligence without permission or without the knowledge of the assessor is really just another form of contract cheating or plagiarism if it’s not referenced and not used with permission.”

“We are concerned about recent advancements in technology-assisted cheating, and we continuously monitor and update our policies and practices accordingly,” an ANU spokesman said.

“One of the things we want to do is make sure we set meaningful assessment tasks for students and not have assessment just seen as something that’s sort of a transactional activity,” Professor Crisp said.

“We want students to see assessment as part of the learning process and make sure that they get something out of assessment that’s more than just providing a standard response or a standard answer back to an academic.”

Banning AI outright is not the solution because today’s students will be using the technologies in their future workplaces. Mr Thorley can see a use for AI in analysing students’ writing and providing feedback.

“Tools like ChatGPT potentially have the ability to change the way we think about what we’re focusing on with writing in the way that the calculator sort of took away the need to remember your times table,” he said.

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