But rather than spending a lot of time trying design courses and exams where students cannot cheat using ChatGPT, I am spending my time developing courses where they do not want to.
When educators invest genuine care into their teaching and their students, when they help students see the relevance of what they are teaching, and when they work to be inclusive, even tools as tempting as ChatGPT become less likely to be used.
During spring semester, along with Professor Erianne Weight and Coach Anson Dorrance, I taught 333 first-year students in a course called “The Art and Science of Expertise.” It was tough. It took a lot of time and care to identify what was most important to teach our students, and even more to keep them engaged during class and believing in themselves, like we believed in them, outside of it.
We taught them that expertise, according to one of foremost thinkers in human performance, Anders Ericsson, is the ability to produce superior performance in a domain at virtually any time with little to no preparation. And experts don’t need tools like ChatGPT to perform.
Now, we didn’t expect students to become experts after just one course, or even after 10,000 hours of practice — a common myth about expertise. Instead, we taught them how to make the most of their own expertise journey. We taught them that experts know a lot (what academics call “walking around knowledge”), so if they wanted to become an expert in something, the first thing they’d have to do is learn a lot of information. And people learn best by making their own meaning of the material, something ChatGPT couldn’t do for them.
Likewise, we worked hard to show our students how everything we asked them to learn and do was relevant to their journey to expertise. We talked about how deliberate practice was essential to expertise development, showing them what it looked like on the soccer field, in the classroom, and in their daily life.
We taught them how to self-regulate their learning, so they could persist in their expertise journey, even when things got tough. And we showed them how mistakes were normal, even essential, to every person’s expertise journey. ChatGPT cannot practice, struggle, or make mistakes for them.
Finally, we worked hard to make our classroom a place where everyone had the tools and support they needed to learn most effectively. The book “Inclusive Teaching” by our colleagues Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy really helped with this. We didn’t assume students understood the “hidden curriculum” of higher education, we made that explicit by explaining the class learning objectives and helping students structure their time inside and outside of our classroom to achieve those objectives.
When people understand what they need to do to be successful, and have the tools and support to do so, there is much less need to yield to the temptations of ChatGPT.
Now, this was the first time we taught this course and the first time we taught so many students. I think we did a pretty good job, but I’m sure we can do better at communicating care, relevance and inclusivity. The more we do so, the more students will understand that cheating by using tools like ChatGPT is limiting them, not helping them, achieve the expertise they came to college to pursue.
Despite all our efforts, did some students cheat? I hope not, but it’d be naïve to assume no one did. And, of course I take academic integrity seriously and would refer any student I suspected of cheating to our Honor System for proper investigation. But I am not worrying about students cheating with tools like ChatGPT. Instead, I am focusing on making classes where students do not want or need to cheat, at all.
Jeff Greene is the McMichael professor in the School of Education at UNC-Chapel Hill. The views expressed are his own.
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