Machine Learning Vs. Student Creativity in Essay Composition

ChatGPT is a powerful large language model that will pretty much answer almost anything. But because of its power, many students use it to solve their homework, especially essays.

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So, has ChatGPT rendered student essays dead? Should educational institutions find a new way to gauge subject competence?

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What Is the Purpose of the Student Essay?

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary , an essay is “an analytic or interpretative literary composition usually dealing with its subject from a limited or personal point of view.” And by going through the word’s history, we find that essay derives from the old Frech word essai, which itself is from the Latin exagium, which means the act of weighing.

So, by this definition, an essay is a written piece wherein the writer—the student—analyzes or weighs a particular subject. So, in an essay, the writer gathers information on the topic they’re covering; then, they’ll digest the material and write an argument on their understanding of the case.

Furthermore, the Western Sydney University Library (PDF) states that an essay’s purpose is to “persuade the reader that your position is credible (i.e., believable and reasonable).” This means that a student shouldn’t just argue their case in an essay, but they should do so in a logical way.

So, for many professors, the student essay is an excellent tool for developing critical thinking. It’s also not as taxing for the students since most essays are take-home assignments.

Libraries, Internet Search, and Analytical Thinking vs. ChatGPT

Before the proliferation of the internet, students had to exert double effort to research and write their essays. So, their critical and analytical thinking skills are exercised in multiple ways—searching for related literature to their topic, analysis of existing data, and how they write and present and their learnings.

When online search peaked, research became much easier for students. They no longer had to go through tons of books, magazines, and articles across different libraries—type in some choice keywords and separate the wheat from the chaff in the results.

But even with the faster search results, they still had to use their critical thinking skills to analyze the data and write what they learned. And while it’s easier to plagiarize now, as you just have to copy and paste the data from your browser to your word processor, teachers can easily catch this form of cheating.

So, although Google made it easier to write essays, it also meant that students could now access more information than ever before. Because of this, the student essay became a more powerful learning tool.

However, when ChatGPT launched, students discovered it was more than just a research and summarizing tool. ChatGPT uses natural language processing (NLP—what is NLP? ) to understand your search intent, and then it conversationally answers your question.

This is the basic gist of how ChatGPT works : when you ask ChatGPT anything, it doesn’t send you to an article or a website. Instead, it goes through all its stored information and recognizes patterns based on what it has learned. From there, it will return an answer it predicts will satisfy your need.

ChatGPT and generative AI generally do not analyze information for you. However, it will deliver results that previous writers have already processed. And, based on your question, it can also give you related results.

AI as a Learning Tool: Harnessing ChatGPT to Improve Understanding

As we’ve discussed above, AI is a powerful tool for learning. Moreover, because it understands the nuances of language, it can deliver far more accurate results. For example, we asked Google and ChatGPT the following question:

“Was Google Search controversial in the academe when it first launched?”

With Google search, the top three results showed an article about Google Books in The New York Times, Google’s Wikipedia page, and an article on The Guardian called “Google, democracy and the truth about internet search.”

On the other hand, the free version of ChatGPT gave a comprehensive answer—albeit without sources.

This result shows how AI and ChatGPT can make research faster and easier for students. And although ChatGPT did not reveal its sources, I can use its results as a springboard for further investigation.

In a conversation with my colleagues, one of MUO’s writers, Garling Wu , said this about using ChatGPT in the academe:

It would come down to how they are using it. It could be to re-write a paragraph, edit for grammar, or ask it to explain how a concept works and use that text as it is in their essay or paraphrase. In another scenario, you could copy the text you found via research through Google, then ask ChatGPT to summarise the key points.

In short, AI is a powerful learning tool, but it’s just a tool nonetheless. Students must still use their critical thinking to produce their final output. So, whether you’re a student or a professional, you must ensure that you use ChatGPT ethically—and here are some ways writers and editors can use AI responsibly .

AI as a Cheating Tool: Making Plagiarism Much Easier and Harder to Detect

However, as with any new technology, some students misuse it. Because ChatGPT answers questions by predicting the correct response, it will paraphrase its sources. So, it’s tempting for many to copy and paste what ChatGPT regurgitated from the internet.

And because ChatGPT’s results are mostly unique, it isn’t easy to spot them. And although OpenAI launched a detection tool to counter ChatGPT-generated text, it isn’t as effective at detecting them. We’ve already read a report from The Washington Post where a ChatGPT detector returned a false positive, and The Conversation published a piece on how AI detectors are easily outsmarted.

Garling Wu added this in our conversation about AI:

The problem is, with ChatGPT around, it could be challenging to assess someone’s knowledge on a topic using an essay, making the whole point of essays in the first place a bit redundant. Some people could use ChatGPT to understand a topic better, while others will use it to pretend that they learned what a class was teaching, or some mix in between.

Because of this, educators must find ways to make student essays more robust. For example, they can no longer assign general topics—like a book report on The Great Gatsby—because it’s easy for students to ask ChatGPT or any other generative AI tool to write it for them.

How Student Essays Need to Evolve to Survive AI

So, how can teachers, professors, and educators change the student essay to make it evolve with AI?

Make the Questions More Pointed or Personal

The biggest thing that generative AI like ChatGPT cannot do is write about personal experience. After all, a student’s life isn’t generally available online, so generative AI cannot predict that student’s life.

Write Essay Questions in the Context of Current Events

The free version of ChatGPT, the most popular generative AI today, is only updated up to September 2021 at the time of writing. So, it would help to ask essay questions relating to events that happened in the past three months.

However, students with access to ChatGPT Plus or GPT-4 get a fully updated version of ChatGPT. So, as part of checking essays, the teacher should also quiz the student on what they wrote.

Students Should Present Their Essays as Reports

Instead of assigning the same topic to all students, educators can give different subjects to students or groups of students. And once they’ve written or prepared their essay, they could present it to the class.

This ensures that the students are truly knowledgeable in their assigned topic. And to further the discussion, the professor should encourage the student audience to ask questions. This will help the reporting student or group and the rest of the class think analytically.

Essays Should Be Written Offline During Class or Exams

If an essay is the best way to determine a student’s understanding of a topic, then it should be limited in the classroom during on-paper exams. That way, the student must rely solely on their knowledge to explain a topic.

Essays Can Still Gauge Student Knowledge and Competence

As previously defined, an essay is designed so students can develop their critical thinking skills and knowledge on a specific topic. And even though ChatGPT can make writing essays easier, it still hasn’t made the student essay obsolete.

After all, if a student does not possess the necessary knowledge to defend their essay, it would show. The crux now lies on the educators—they should ask essay questions that make it difficult for students to answer just ChatGPT. Or they should make the essay complex enough to require critical thinking—even with AI.

And if they suspect that a student used AI, they shouldn’t automatically fail that student—instead, they should give the student an oral exam based on their essay to gauge their knowledge accurately. After all, if they just used ChatGPT to get a good essay grade, they probably don’t understand their output and will fail the oral test.

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So, has ChatGPT rendered student essays dead? Should educational institutions find a new way to gauge subject competence?

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