Cheating With ChatGPT
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
Like just about every other professor in the world, it seems, I've been dealing with my share of students who've tried using ChatGPT to write their assignments for them. Not unsurprisingly, this problem showed up to the biggest degree in my winter-term course, which involves some tricky coding in a mildly obscure language. (The language is Prolog, so it's not that obscure but it does work in an extremely different way from the Java and Python that most computer science students are used to, and it can take a while to get your head around. I don't think I even had my head around it until the second time I taught the course.)
In this context, the students who are cheating are pretty obvious. My assignments usually involve asking them to demonstrate a particular technique or way of looking at a problem. Here's some code that does a breadth-first search through a problem space, for instance; here's our worked example from class of how we apply this code to Problem A; now modify the code so that it instead solves Problem B. The cheating students - the ones that I catch, at least - don't modify the code that way. They just plunk down some Problem B-solving code that has nothing to do, in its inner workings, with anything we saw in class. (If they're lucky, it's code that works, but it isn't always that, either.) Often they also make liberal use of external libraries that I kept telling them not to use.
What I keep thinking about, though, is not the techniques the cheaters use, but the excuses they give when I call them on it. Our school has a procedure for academic integrity cases; I know some profs who don't follow it because it's too much paperwork, but I follow it, and one of the nice things about this procedure is that it gives the students a chance to explain themselves and clear up any misunderstandings. Sometimes I get suspicious of a student but it turns out that they didn't cheat, or at least that I can't feel confident the balance of evidence says so. Sometimes - I think this is the most common case, actually - the student promptly apologizes and throws themselves on my mercy. Occasionally I get a non-responding student, or one who's like "meh" about the whole thing, or one who insists that they have no idea how they managed to write something that's an exact verbatim copy of the writing on this other website, they've never seen that website in their life, honest. Or I get the one student who shows up to an in-person meeting oozing politeness and concern but also pointing out that, well, they checked what the ombundsman's website says about academic integrity and they're pretty sure I didn't explicitly post a notice that the students couldn't collaborate on an individual assignment, and of course they understand now that that's what I meant, but they just want me to be prepared, in the case of an appeal...
Yeah. But anyway, most of them are upset and embarrassed and apologize. And there's this one thread that runs through almost all of the cheating students' apologies, whether they cheated with ChatGPT or with something else. They all say, I'm sorry, the assignment was so hard, I couldn't figure it out, I was running out of time to come up with the answers so I looked them up.
I'm always frustrated with this because, look, I have office hours. I hold them twice a week, during the fall and winter terms, and most weeks nobody shows up. I post them in my slides and on the course website but students, even non-cheating students, keep saying they don't know when they are. I keep saying students can come to me or to the TAs - in the office hours, over email, or whatever else works - if they have any questions or need any help. But they don't! And then they can't figure out the work and don't know where to turn.
And this is where I'm deciding that the underlying problem is not ChatGPT, it's students who don't know what the fuck to do when they need help, and it's specifically what's happened to education since COVID started.
Because, look, I was teaching before the pandemic too. Not that there weren't already cheaters then, but people used to come to my office hours a lot more. People used to know, to a greater degree than before, how to show up with their half-completed code and their confusion why it wasn't working quite right, and how to let the prof look it over and gently guide them in the direction of figuring out what was going on.
And then the current crop of students spent several years not being able to do that, because everything was online.
I happen to be autistic enough that I like online learning just fine. It's nice to be able to walk into an asynchronous setup and do everything at my own speed, in a quiet room of my own choosing, with a snack break or stretch break (or a "fuck off for a while and write fanfic" break) whenever I feel like it. But even for students like me, it can be hard to know what to do in online learning when you do get stuck. And it's hard to convey the kind of tone online that encourages people to reach out. I vividly remember a couple of times in my education when I contacted an online instructor and did ask for help, and the instructor sent back a terse, unhelpful email with the distinct sense that I shouldn't be wasting their time. Which probably wasn't the instructor's intent, but I don't know? A lot of my own philosophy of teaching revolves around trying NOT to ever give off that impression, online or in person. (And I think it works - my course evaluations are always telling me I'm caring and approachable, even if they have complaints about other things.) But you can do it without realizing, a lot more easily over email than in person, and even if I'm not doing it, probably the students are used to their other instructors doing it. There's a cumulative effect.
(Professors, as a rule, are not taught how to be good teachers. There's some resources available if they want to learn, often in the form of micro-classes being offered by some university office or other, but you have to take the initiative and find those things yourself, and it's often more like "how to use this trendy new teaching method" rather than basic stuff like "how not to intimidate students" - or even "here's how to find the forms and procedures that you're supposed to be using in the first place." This is a fact about professors, at almost every university, that most people have no idea about. We're experts in our fields so we're supposed to just naturally know how to explain those fields to another person, I guess.)
I don't know what to do about this except keep communicating even more loudly and clearly? The students already think I am friendly and caring. (Which baffles me, as an autistic person, but I guess I would need to unpack that in a whole other post.) But I guess I need to have it in bigger letters at the start of every course - not just "here are my office hours" but "HERE IS WHAT OFFICE HOURS ARE FOR. HERE IS HOW TO USE THEM! IT IS OKAY TO USE THEM, I PROMISE! IT IS INCREDIBLY BETTER THAN YOUR OTHER OPTIONS!" because genuinely the current crop of students doesn't know.
And in the absence of knowing, when they run into trouble, they're going to opt for what feels easier and more convenient. Like a friendly and non-judgmental chatbot that pretends to know everything, instead of a human who might be annoyed with them in person. It's trendy to blame ChatGPT, but if they didn't have ChatGPT, they'd just cheat with some other easy online thing.