ChatGPT’s Role in Modern Academia: Five Key Educational Applications

One of ChatGPT’s best features is that it can explain just about anything to you using creative new ways until you fully understand. Unlike a human teacher, no matter how long you ask ChatGPT the same question, it doesn’t get impatient, frustrated, or refuse to answer.

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This makes ChatGPT an incredibly useful learning tool. Unfortunately, some students have chosen to use the chatbot to cheat rather than explore how it could help them improve in the classroom. So, we’ve put together five ethical ways students can make use of ChatGPT without gaming the system.

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1. Develop Crash Study Plans

You have a few weeks to that all-important examination, but you feel you’ve been ghosting through your classes and are ill-prepared for what’s coming. So how do you cover your coursework within a limited time? Well, with the proper prompts, ChatGPT can come to your rescue.

Provide ChatGPT with your free days, preferred study time, study duration, and target topics, if any, and ChatGPT will generate a crash study plan to help you navigate heavy coursework in a few days or weeks.

We prompted ChatGPT to make a study plan for an “Introduction to JavaScript programming” course, and here’s the result:

The resulting study plan is crude yet efficient. But there’s room for modifications. You can use follow-up prompts to refine the results better. For instance, you can ask ChatGPT to:

• Refine the plan to place [more/less] emphasis on certain topics.
• Refine the plan to add [minutes/hours] breaks during study hours.
• Refine the plan to allocate [more/less] time to practical sessions.

2. Identify Shortcuts or Tricks for Complex Course Problems

One of the most exciting uses of ChatGPT for students is as a tool for identifying easier or alternative ways of solving complex course problems. For instance, ChatGPT has a huge collection of shortcuts and tricks for solving a wide range of complex STEM problems. From basic physics and math to complex engineering problems, ChatGPT can lay out easier, proven ways to solve complex problems and arrive at accurate solutions with much less effort.

Below is a screenshot of a popular approach for finding the sum of the first 1,000 positive integers.

However, you can also ask ChatGPT for a shortcut to solving the problem. For example, when we asked ChatGPT to provide a shortcut, the AI chatbot generated the following results:

When asking ChatGPT for shortcuts to solve a problem, always ask it to clarify whether the shortcut applies to all cases of a problem.

You can go even further in some STEM problems by asking ChatGPT to provide a shortcut to solving a problem through visual representation. This could be particularly useful for visual learners who process and retain information better when presented visually rather than through text. For example, here’s ChatGPT’s response when we prompted it to solve the same problem using a visual representation:

If you have a preferred way that makes it easy for you to learn, ChatGPT can help present complex problems in that way to make it easier for you to understand.

3. Stay Ahead of the Learning Curve

Reading up on the lessons you’ll learn next can help you understand the subject more when it is eventually taught. How can you do this with ChatGPT?

Provide the AI chatbot with a course outline or a topic you are currently learning in class, and ChatGPT will generate the most likely lessons to come up next and some tips to help you prepare for your upcoming classes. You can also ask the chatbot to generate some questions that could be asked in class. What better way to get some positive feedback in class?

4. Summarize Long Text and Extract Key Points

Most of what you’ll do as a student involves reading long texts and making summaries or key points. ChatGPT is impressively good at text summarization and extracting key points from voluminous texts. It could be an incredibly useful reading companion, helping you make sense of large texts without having to read through the entirety of them. Instead, copy the text in bits, feed it to ChatGPT, and ask it to make summaries or identify the key points from it.

Unfortunately, ChatGPT isn’t designed for summaries by default. There is a limit to how many words you can throw at it at a time. Also, ChatGPT will likely respond to any text you feed it without waiting to get the entire text to be summarized. To fix this, use the following prompt:

Whenever I provide a prompt, simply reply with a full stop (period). Keep doing this until I ask for a summary of all the text provided.

After using the prompt, split the text you wish to summarize into bits and feed the entirety of it to ChatGPT. After you’ve provided the entire text, prompt it to extract the key point or create a summary of a certain length from the text you’ve provided.

5. Improve or Review Creative Writing

ChatGPT is very impressive in generating creative work like letters, essays, and academic writing. Although some students have chosen the rather unethical part of outsourcing the entire writing process to ChatGPT, the tool can be utilized for reviewing and improving something you wrote rather than asking the chatbot to write it from scratch.

One of the problems with using ChatGPT to write an essay of any kind is that it can make up figures, events, entities, and concepts and present them as facts. On the other hand, if you put in the honest work of doing the research and creating content, ChatGPT can help you polish it up, giving you something both interesting and factual.

We put together a short story in a haphazard manner, as shown in the screenshot above, and asked ChatGPT to clean it up. Here’s the result:

Rather than outright asking ChatGPT to write an essay, you can write yours and use the following prompts to improve your work:

• Rewrite the text in quotes using correct grammar (but do not rewrite actual quotes!)
• Rewrite the text in quotes to be more [interesting/professional/confrontational/polite]
• Suggests possible improvements to the text in quotes
• Identity possible fluffs or bits of text that don’t add meaning to the text in quotes
• What key points are missing in the text?
• Suggests some improvements that would make the text suitable for a [target audience].

Use ChatGPT Cautiously In Education

While ChatGPT is undoubtedly an impressive learning companion, it is important to understand that the tool is still a development product. Using ChatGPT as the sole source of information in academic settings is not advisable; the chatbot cannot separate fact from fiction. While we encourage you to make the best use of ChatGPT for learning, use it with caution.

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