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Alarmed by A.I. Chatbots, Universities Start Revamping How They Teach [1]

['Kalley Huang']

Date: 2023-01-16

Students are “plagiarizing this because the assignments can be plagiarized,” said Sid Dobrin, chair of the English department at the University of Florida.

Frederick Luis Aldama, the humanities chair at the University of Texas at Austin, said he planned to teach newer or more niche texts that ChatGPT might have less information about, such as William Shakespeare’s early sonnets instead of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

The chatbot may motivate “people who lean into canonical, primary texts to actually reach beyond their comfort zones for things that are not online,” he said.

In case the changes fall short of preventing plagiarism, Mr. Aldama and other professors said they planned to institute stricter standards for what they expect from students and how they grade. It is now not enough for an essay to have just a thesis, introduction, supporting paragraphs and a conclusion.

“We need to up our game,” Mr. Aldama said. “The imagination, creativity and innovation of analysis that we usually deem an A paper needs to be trickling down into the B-range papers.”

Universities are also aiming to educate students about the new A.I. tools. The University at Buffalo in New York and Furman University in Greenville, S.C., said they planned to embed a discussion of A.I. tools into required courses that teach entering or freshman students about concepts such as academic integrity.

“We have to add a scenario about this, so students can see a concrete example,” said Kelly Ahuna, who directs the academic integrity office at the University at Buffalo. “We want to prevent things from happening instead of catch them when they happen.”

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/16/technology/chatgpt-artificial-intelligence-universities.html

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