Will ChatGPT destroy education as we know it?

Would it be a bad thing?

January 06, 2023

I’m enthralled with the ChatGPT platform. I’ve used it for research, developing outlines, drafting recipes, and much more. I even had it outline and draft an entire book in under an hour. It’s an intriguing platform with seemingly endless possibilties for exploration, but it has raised a number of valid concerns.

Chief among those is its reason for being. David Golumbia warned that its existence was problematic as its progenitors were effectuating nihilism through their exploits. I found his argument compelling.

Another important concern is around the potential impact to education. I’ve seen many academics posting concerns arould the platform’s potential to render much of our current approach useless.

John Warner recently wrote a related post for Inside Higher Ed, in which he made the argument that ChatGPT should not be viewed so much as a threat, but rather as a wake-up call for our education system. There are a few key points of his that I’d like to highlight.

For me, it’s simply another testament to the wrong turn we made more than a couple of decades ago when it comes to what we ask students to do when they write in school contexts, and the kind of standardized assessments that have come to dominate. Rather than letting students explore the messy and fraught process of learning how to write, we have instead incentivized them to behave like algorithms, creating simulations that pass surface-level muster. Teaching through templates like the five-paragraph essay… prevents students from developing the skills, attitudes, knowledge and habits of mind of writers, the writer’s practice.

-John Warner

This really hit home for me. I’ve spent an excessive amount of time as a student, and have several more years on the other side of the equation. Through the years, I’ve felt there’s been a general a shift towards ‘teaching to the test,’ wherein the priority is delivering desired scores. Warner offers a problem with this.

There is nothing new about a disconnect between assessments and actual learning. Any of us who have crammed for an exam only to forget 90 percent of what we were supposed to know within hours of taken the exam know this to be true.

—John Warner

As a teacher, I only gave exams once—in my first semester. I found it to be a wholly unsatisfying experience that was ineffective in validating the desired outcome. Since then, I’ve dropped the tests and replaced them with things like writing assignments in which I ask students to reflect on what they’ve learned. They share back their understanding in their own words or do things like discuss how the ideas might be useful and in what contexts. Doing so offers them the chance to spend a little more time with the ideas, which along with the direct aim of facilitating understanding can also aid recall.

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I’m fortunate to teach in a program that’s oriented around active-learning. I teach contextually-relevant case studies in what’s effectively a workshop setting for much of the time I spend with my classes. I cut off my lectures after around 15-20 minutes (before my droning anesthethizes the class). From there, students usually spend the balance of the session in small groups working on complex issues, and I bounce around the room facilitating discussions and supporting groups that need help. My current course is designed to help students synthesize ideas they have learned throughout the program. Rather than regurgitating ideas, they’re asked to apply them. As the teacher, it’s a lot of fun to watch the students engage in this way and it’s also very rewarding.

This brings me back around to John Warner’s closing.

…we can give students learning experiences of intrinsic interest and extrinsic worth so they’re not tempted into doing an end run.

We can utilize methods of assessment that take into consideration the processes and experiences of learning, rather than simply relying on a single artifact like an essay or exam…

We can require students to practice metacognitive reflection, asking them to articulate what they have learned and then valuing and responding to what they tell us.

We can change the way we grade so that the fluent but dull prose that ChatGPT can churn out does not actually pass muster. We can require students to demonstrate synthesis. We can ask them to bring their own unique perspectives and intelligences to the questions we ask them. By giving students work worth doing, we can ask more of them.

-John Warner

I don’t know if ChatGPT will destroy education as we know it, but I hope something does.