College profs to use paper exams to prevent cheating with ChatGPT

College professors who say they have caught dozens of students cheating by using OpenAI’s artificial intelligence-powered bot ChatGPT say they will revert to paper exams this fall.

“We’re in full-on crisis mode,” Timothy Main, a writing professor at Canada’s Conestoga College wrote on social media recently, saying that he “caught dozens” of his students who plagiarized using ChatGPT.

Main told the Associated Press that he had students turn in assignments that were lifted word for word from ChatGPT without even bothering to read what it is that they copied.

“I had answers come in that said, ‘I am just an AI language model, I don’t have an opinion on that’,” Main said.

This fall, Main and colleagues are overhauling the school’s required freshman writing course.

Writing assignments will be more personalized to encourage students to write about their own experiences, opinions and perspectives.

All assignments and the course syllabi will have strict rules forbidding the use of artificial intelligence.

Darren Hick, who teaches philosophy at Furman University, said that he caught at least two students who cheated using ChatGPT.

“There is going to be a big shift back to paper-based tests,” said Bonnie MacKellar, a computer science professor at St. John’s University in Queens.

The discipline already had a “massive plagiarism problem” with students borrowing computer code from friends or cribbing it from the internet, said MacKellar.

She worries intro-level students taking AI shortcuts are cheating themselves out of skills needed for upper-level classes.

“I hear colleagues in humanities courses saying the same thing: It’s back to the blue books,” MacKellar said.

In addition to requiring students in her intro courses to handwrite their code, the paper exams will count for a higher percentage of the grade this fall, she said.

Students who are accustomed to using technological advances to take exams will have to get used to more rudimentary methods of test-taking.

Ronan Takizawa, a sophomore at Colorado College, has never heard of a blue book.

As a computer science major, that feels to him like going backward, but he agrees it would force students to learn the material.

“Most students aren’t disciplined enough to not use ChatGPT,” he said. Paper exams “would really force you to understand and learn the concepts.”

Takizawa said students are at times confused about when it’s OK to use AI and when it’s cheating.

Using ChatGPT to help with certain homework like summarizing reading seems no different from going to YouTube or other sites that students have used for years, he said.

ChatGPT has been able to match — or in some cases outperform — humans in several fields, including mock exams in obstetrics and gynecology, reasoning questions usually put forward in standardized tests, and the MBA exam given by the prestigious Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

The rapid advancement of ChatGPT and other AI-powered bots have fueled concerns that the new technology will render millions of people jobless within a few years.

With Post Wires