Today I start teaching introductory computer science at Rhodes College. It’s the first course in the computer science major sequence, but it is also a recommended elective for non-majors. I’ve been told to expect non-majors to make up as much as three-quarters of the class. It goes without saying that we’ll be talking about data and the importance of information management.
I was working on the syllabus over the weekend, and gathering all of the statements that it is supposed to include. One professor described it as being like a Terms of Service. One of those sections covers Cheating and Plagiarism. It extends to the use of AI.
Whereas most companies are trying to figure out how to include AI in their products, services, and processes, most educators are trying to figure out how to exclude AI from their classrooms.
Maybe that’s a little bit of an overstatement, but there has been something of an arms race between students and teachers when it comes to AI. Never underestimate the creativity of students when it comes to making their lives easier, finishing their assignments faster, and especially getting better grades.
The allure is nearly irresistible. Type in the question. Press enter. The right answer (usually) pops out. Copy. Paste. Submit.
ChatGPT is like a printing press for ‘A’ papers.
College—all school—is supposed to be about learning. Having ChatGPT do your work for you is the opposite of learning. But as I said, the allure is nearly irresistible. And the overwhelming majority of educators are concerned about this.
Just like AI is blotting out the sun in business, it’s doing the same thing, but for different reasons, in education.
So, what to do about it? The initial, reflexive answer was to forbid it. Schools blocked websites and teachers used text analyzers that calculated the probability that a paper was written by AI. They don’t work very well and sometimes give false-positives. I have known students whose original work was flagged as AI-generated. A false-accusation can leave life-long scars. Then, teachers started embedding hidden words in the prompts so that if an essay on Beethoven included the words “banana” and “Tokyo” it was certainly AI-generated. The arms race continues. It’s getting harder to identify AI-generated answers. Students are aware of these techniques and generative AI is getting better at mirroring the writing style of individual users.
I think that when you turn fifty you get the ID card and secret handshake that require you to say sentences that begin, “Back when I was your age….” Perhaps looking backward at the impact of past new technology will provide some insight into how to approach this current new technology.
Calculators: How often did we hear, “students don’t need to learn math because they have ready-access to calculators.” Didn’t work that way, though. Everyone still has to know at least the basics. The cash register might show pictures of the change that the cashier should make, but are you going to take out your calculator to know whether you got the correct change? A calculator or spreadsheet will give you the answer you ask for, but you still have to know how to set up the problem, and when and how to use the different functions. Technology just made the number crunching easier.
A quick aside from another generation back. My parents both completed doctoral research in Chemistry and Biology before calculators and computers became commonplace. Both had black belts in slide rule. (My mom was teaching college Chemistry when the Texas Instruments calculators first came out, and she could answer problems faster on a slide rule than her students could on a calculator.) Also indispensable was the CRC Handbook. You’ve never heard of a CRC Handbook? If you know someone who was in math or the sciences in the 1970s or earlier, chances are they used one. Maybe they still have it, taking up space on a bookshelf like the slide rule has been lonely all these decades taking up space in a drawer. But again, calculators and computers just made the number crunching easier.
Handwriting: I still remember starting to learn to write in cursive in the first grade, with Mrs. Marshalwitz drawing the top curve of a cursive lower-case ‘c’ over and over again on the board and saying “rock…rock…rock….” We spent hours filling up pages just practicing the component parts of letters. Then computers entered the classrooms. Handwriting class was replaced with keyboarding class. Cursive is no longer taught. I don’t think that handwriting is even taught. Now the joke is that if Boomers and GenXers want to write in a secret code that younger people can’t read, use cursive. Yet, there are still situations where you still need to be able to use a pen or pencil. You won’t always have a keyboard with you to capture notes or thoughts, or signing contracts. A friend told me about a group of students that took an hour-long test on paper, and most did not have the hand-muscle stamina to make it through the exam. I guess that also explains the squiggly signatures. And for better or for worse, one’s intelligence is often judged by the quality of their handwriting. Nevertheless, for most people, myself included, typing is faster.
Research: Remember researching a topic before the internet? Or looking for a book in the library? My first real research paper assignment came in the tenth grade. Mrs. Janet Caporizzo’s class. I selected a topic by walking down the encyclopedia aisle in the library, pulling a volume from the shelf, and opening it to a random page. Heraldry. Sounds good to me. Next stop: card catalog. If you’re not familiar with this ancient database management system, ask your grandparents. Or the internet, I suppose. I looked up a couple books and found them in the stacks. There were a half-dozen or so on the subject. I pulled out a few that looked promising, carried them to one of the desks, and started looking through them. I took notes on paper. I wrote the paper on paper. It needed to be typed, and at the time we had just got an Apple ][+ computer. So, I typed the paper into this new thing called a word processor. Apple Writer. The computer had no capitals key. Press escape once for capitals, twice to move the cursor. Today, I do a ton of family history research using online images of 18th century documents. Would someone who did that same research 50 years ago think I was cheating because they had to go to the courthouse and find the books and look through them in person, by hand? Maybe. The computer has accelerated the access and the finding, but I still need to extract the right information and integrate it properly.
Grammar and Spelling: Once upon a time, the computer would let you spell something wrong or use improper grammar? The typewriter cared even less. Now, just throw a bunch of letters that are in the vicinity of a word onto the page, and Microsoft Word will fix the spelling automatically, or give you a red squiggly line to let you know that something needs your attention. Similarly, just throw a bunch of words together in the vicinity of a paragraph and Grammarly will fix it for you. Working like this, Michelangelo would just had to have picked out a nice piece of marble and leave it to the computer to do the rest. Actually, that exists today.
Were there benefits to these new technologies? Yes. Did all of the concerns come to pass? Some. Did their benefits outweigh the liabilities? Probably, but there has definitely been a cost. With every technological advance there’s been an erosion of human skill.
You see, many of the decision-makers had the benefit of having mastered the underlying, fundamental skills before each technological advancement came along. Technology made those tasks easier, but having the fundamental skills was taken for granted when considering their necessity for the next generation. It was easy for those who already possessed them. Let’s learn from history.
We don’t have to accept the inevitability of the liabilities, but it will take some effort on our part.
So, back to the original syllabus question. Do you really think that if the use of generative AI were to be strictly forbidden, students wouldn’t use it? Seriously? It is not going away, and it is going to be used. But instead of being forbidden, I’d rather students learn to use the new technology appropriately.
The key is to structure classes, lectures, assignments, quizzes, and tests in a way that focuses them on concepts, critical thinking, and problem solving.
These are the skills that always should have been the focus, but perhaps were sometimes lost in the manual labor (so to speak). Generative AI is distilling the need for those skills. It can give so much if we take advantage of it and use it properly. It will take so much if we let it.
