No local colleges or universities to date have issued outright bans of the chatbot, which can generate mounds of text in answer to a user's question. Most are leaving it up to faculty members to decide how they handle Chat GPT in their classrooms: Some instructors might forbid students from using the technology to help with essays and other assignments, but many have informed their institutions of plans to integrate it into coursework.
"This is a tool. We can't just shut it down inside the classroom," said Niki Whiteside, assistant vice chancellor for instructional innovation and support at San Jacinto College. "When (students) leave, or when they walk out of our buildings, they're going to be faced with it, they're going to have opportunities to use it. Really, it helps everyone if we can teach them how to use it appropriately and effectively."
While AI has existed in various forms for decades, the advent of ChatGPT seemed to arrive quickly and without a manual for higher education institutions. Online think-pieces proliferated — one December article in The Atlantic boldly declared "The College Essay is Dead" — and administrators and professors convened to start tackling the issue.
At Rice University, professors' feelings first skewed toward worry about supposed threats to essay writing, which have since ceded to overwhelming optimism about the learning opportunities that ChatGPT might provide, said First-Year Intensive Writing Seminar Director David Messmer.
For those that remain concerned about plagiarism, AI could force professors to rework their lesson plans for the better, he said.
"New technologies don't make honest students into cheaters," Messmer said. "What we need to be doing is what we should have always been doing. If we believe writing is important, we need to have assignments that illustrate to them why writing is important."
Chat GPT has its limitations, which developer OpenAI has acknowledged. The tool "sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers," can require several tweaks to prompts before receiving the desired outcome and is often "excessively verbose and overuses certain phrases," according to the company.
At the University of Houston, mathematics professor Jeff Morgan said the tool only scored 50 percent on a recent midterm, in some cases missing easy questions and nailing harder ones. An upcoming assignment garnered similar results, and he said he plans to turn it on its head.
Morgan, who is also the university's associate provost for education innovation and technology, said he is changing the assignment to provide both the questions and ChatGPT's answers to his students. He will then make the students analyze ChatGPT's responses and prove why they are or are not correct.
"There's reason for concern, but I think there are many more opportunities," Morgan said.
HERE TO STAY
Universities and colleges are having ongoing conversations about the classroom response to AI, which officials said they expect will evolve. At UH, the "ChatGPT User Group" is a working group open to any faculty member at the university. Rice has held several panels on the issue.
Academic integrity policies will change at some, but not all, institutions. San Jacinto College and Houston Community College administrators said the schools will broaden their academic integrity policies to account for AI. The University of Houston and Lone Star College are also considering whether changes to their anti-plagiarism policies are necessary.
One of the biggest unanswered questions is how to monitor for plagiarism, since companies are still scrambling to develop tools that detect the use of ChatGPT. At UH, Morgan said faculty members can likely pick up on plagiarism based on the quality of work but still have to be careful of falsely accusing a student. And Messmer, at Rice, said ChatGPT can easily blur the lines on what is one's own work and what is a computer's.
Lone Star College Chancellor Stephen Head said his institutions are prepared to use plagiarism checkers as they're put in use for ChatGPT. The community college enrolls a large number of students online, meaning cheating while test-taking might be more of an issue than it would be on a campus.
"Students are going to have to know that if you're going online, then we're going to be monitoring it," Head said. "If you're going to be concerned about it, then maybe it's not for you."
Head and Messmer agreed that any student who uses copy-and-paste responses from ChatGPT would be at a disadvantage in the long-run. Communicating expectations — and the limitations and benefits of AI — is going to be essential, they said.
"Writing is, in itself, a form of instruction," Messmer said. "If you're not going through the process, you're going to miss out on a good learning opportunity."
Morgan said he hopes faculty members don't waste too much time worrying about plagiarism, especially since ChatGPT is going to be harnessed for positive purposes.
People were nervous about how instruction would change after the invention of the word processing machine or the personal calculator — but professors are still vital and students are still learning, he said.
"Anything that anyone wants to learn, they can learn from books. And yet, there's this human connection that has been so essential in education," Morgan said. "We're made for connection, and I think people will always be seeking out this connection."
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