High schools offer Advanced Placement and/or International Baccalaureate programs to prepare advanced students for college-level courses. Successful students in those classes are expected to demonstrate proficient critical-thinking skills, which includes writing. ChatGPT can generate essays in conversational English that appear to be written by a person. The debate is whether the ideas noted in an essay or paper come from the student, while the tool can only take credit for the grammar and mechanics of the writing but not the critical thinking.
The College Board, which administers Advance Placement (AP) courses, prohibits the use of ChatGPT under any circumstances. On its website, the agency notes, “Like educators across the country, AP teachers are confronting the implications of ChatGPT and other tools.”
“Students are categorically prohibited from using any and all artificial intelligence tools (ChatGPT or DALL-E) or essay writing services (Chegg or Course Hero) to guide, brainstorm, draft or create student work related to any AP assessment, including written projects and performance tasks,” the policy on the College Board’s website said. “The AP Program reserves the right to validate student work submitted for AP African American Studies, AP Art and Design, AP Computer Science Principles, AP Research and AP Seminar with plagiarism-detection tools and other investigative efforts to identify non-student generated work. Any use of artificial intelligence tools or essay writing services will be considered an exam violation and may result in the cancellation of a student’s AP score(s).“
International Baccalaureate (IB) has a different policy. On its website, IB states that it will not ban the use of AI software, because doing so would be “an ineffective way to deal with innovation.”
“The IB believes that artificial intelligence (AI) technology will become part of our everyday lives — like spell checkers, translation software and calculators. We, therefore, need to adapt and transform our educational programs and assessment practices so that students can use these new AI tools ethically and effectively. The IB is not going to ban the use of such software but will work with schools to help them support their students on how to use these tools ethically in line with our principles of academic integrity,” the policy on IB’s website states.
Instead of a ban, IB’s policy calls for proper attribution when AI-generated text is used.
“Students should be aware that the IB does not regard any work produced — even only in part — by such tools to be their own. Therefore, as with any quote or material from another source, it must be clear that AI-generated text, image or graph included in a piece of work, has been copied from such software. The software must be credited in the body of the text and appropriately referenced in the bibliography. As with current practice, an essay which is predominantly quotes will not get many, if any, marks with an IB mark scheme,” the policy states.
Government Technology left messages with both agencies requesting elaborations on their policies, but the calls were not returned.
As early as January, less than two months after the release of ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 U.S. college students by the online magazine Intelligent found that 30 percent of them had used the chatbot to finish written homework assignments, and 60 percent said they had used it on more than half of their assignments.
Students using AI technology for coursework is one concern, but high school students using it to get into college is a different matter. Rachel Rubin, co-founder of the Spark Admissions college-admissions consulting service in Boston, said even though typical candidates for the most selective higher-learning institutions in the nation submit more than 30 essays across all of their applications during their college search, AI tools like ChatGPT — at least so far — play a limited role.
The generative AI tool pulls information from the Internet, not a person’s brain. Although essay questions vary by institution, the main idea is to ask the applicant to reflect on their own experiences, using examples from their own life, not someone else’s biography found online.
“Strong student essays showcase one’s personality, growth over time and who they are today,” Rubin said in an interview with Government Technology Friday. “ChatGPT cannot provide that at a higher quality.”
Rubin, who advises students across the nation who are trying to get into the most competitive universities, said she has not been asked by any students yet if ChatGPT should or could be used on college essays. She thinks the tool could be useful at the beginning of a search to obtain general information about schools and how they differ from one another. It might also help them formulate general ideas on how to use or develop interpersonal skills for writing. Beyond that, she said, college applicants would have a difficult time writing a strong essay without their own thoughts and words.
Rubin said she's confident that the development of anti-plagiarism software will keep up with the generative AI tools. She also believes AI technology will never replace high school and college counselors.
“AI could affect many different parts of [college] admissions, and maybe there are potential dangers to worry about in cheating, but I’m not overly concerned about it,” Rubin said. “ChatGPT is not going on college visits, and it’s not intensely specific to individual students.”
