A tweet from the writer John Ganz, occasioned by Robin’s essay, sums up my own feelings: “really glad i never have to go to school again i’ll tell you that much.” What ChatGPT does to students is even worse than what it’s done to professors. It diminishes their access to the special kind of living with texts that only writing can make happen. This is an injustice similar to the gutting of the humanities and foreign languages curriculum at West Virginia University. Entire worlds of knowledge and experience which colleges used to bequeath to new generations will disappear.
I feel certain that something along the lines of Robin’s strategy is the only thing that will reduce cheating on essays to an acceptable level. The temptation will simply be too strong. It remains to be seen how widely such tactics will be embraced, though. I asked several friends who teach college literature whether they were planning anything similar to Robin. They would add in-class exams, they said, but they had no plans to modify their take-home essay assignments yet. “The students will cheat,” as one said, “but I can’t stop them.”
The consequence of ChatGPT-4 in the short and medium term will be not chaos but nihilism. The entire edifice of paper writing and evaluation, and the learning that take-home essays are specially poised to foster, will become a meaningless game. Some conscientious students will work hard to write original papers, but their instructors will never be able to have much faith in them, and the students will know that. The suspicion of ubiquitous false coin will make everyone poor.
Let’s Talk Lawmaker Influence Over Curriculum
State lawmakers seem to want more say than ever over what students learn in public college classrooms. Join us on Thursday, September 14, at 12 noon ET, as our Emma Pettit and a panel of experts delves into this trend and how it affects teaching, academic governance, and campus climate.
