Comment by more_corn
3 years ago
Unfortunately this will also catch students who write clear and well structured essays. My friend was taking a summer course on her break from college. Her professor accused her of cheating because her work was a clear outlier. It was a clear outlier because she was a significantly better writer.
A better check is that there’ll be a mismatch between content and citations, or the citations will be entirely hallucinated. As far as I can tell ChatGPT is incapable of generating actual citations.
The outliers consistently write better prose but they never include nearly as much distinct points of information within their responses. They also have way less fluff. They include personal anecdotes. That professor probably didn't have enough materials of hers to work with.
As for checking hallucinations I definitely do not have the time to go that deep on 75 submissions a week. If that could be automated it'd be helpful. The students are correct that I can afford to spend only about 5 minutes per essay on grading (they're short, 200-250 words).
next up: CiteGPT
plug in your finished work, making up whatever stats and arguments and assertions suits your taste or agenda, and CiteGPT will back-solve matching snippets that support your writing, inserting all in line citations and building a reference list automatically. Maybe even suggest minor tweaks to make your arguments match the available supporting material.
This problem has such a simple solution: have the kids write some in-class essays throughout the term. Then, if cheating is suspected on a homework assignment, the teacher cross-references against the known GPT-free work to compare its quality.
It does mean that good writers may be able to get away with cheating, but then they really didn’t need the practice to begin with.
The students just use GPT within class because they are completely shameless. I'd have to sit behind them and watch their screens like a prison guard. I haven't resigned myself to that so far.
I think the more reasonable solution is to just wait for the university to take active measures against it, and accept that this is just a new development in how students cheat, which they have always done. The fact that the administrators are dumping this all on teachers and TAs is totally unfair to the actual workers.
Why can’t this be done like in-class pencil-and-paper exams?