Artificial intelligence will no longer disappear from schools and universities. Cheating has become normal with Chat-GPT. Educational institutions face a huge challenge. But artificial intelligence is also an opportunity.
Fraud, cleverness and efficiency are close together in Chat-GPT.
Illustration Simon Tanner / NZZ
A ghost is haunting schools and universities: it’s called artificial intelligence (AI) – and most teachers and lecturers don’t really know what to do with it. Forbid? Just let the students do it? Stick your head in the sand as if Chat-GPT and other writing and research machines didn’t even exist?
This would prove that they have no idea how the young people they are supposed to teach work. A survey by the Zurich University of Applied Sciences showed that two thirds of students received help from artificial intelligence with their bachelor’s theses. The Chat-GPT writing bot delivers entire paragraphs when asked. You can then rephrase them a bit and pass them off as your own. One student says: “I always got away with it.”
Fraud, efficiency and cleverness are close together. Independent thinking – a core value of education – is under threat. The universities have to come up with something. You can find out more in the text by my colleague Reto U. Schneider on this topic.
But we don’t want to paint things black. Artificial intelligence is also an opportunity. You should try that. How about a “role prompting” with Gretchen, Faust or Mephisto? I didn’t know what that was either. But my research with Zurich teacher Robin Fürst shows that Chat-GPT can’t do everything. For example, be creative or be critical. We humans are much better at this than machines. You can practice this with students – as long as they have read Goethe’s “Faust”.
Speaking of practicing: It’s autumn, and that means: Many children and young people are already preparing for the high school exams in spring. This semester, some school classes in the city of Zurich are doing this in a new way. They are working with an interactive app that was developed specifically for the Gymi exam. Thanks to AI, the tool also has a “coach” for writing essays. How exactly does this work? My colleague Stephanie Caminada looked at it.
I wish you stimulating reading!