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Sept. 7, 2023

To the Editor:

Re “How Schools Can Cope and Grow When Their Students Are Using A.I.,” by Kevin Roose (The Shift column, Business, Aug. 29):

Mr. Roose’s suggestion that educators embrace generative A.I. and view it as an “opportunity” or “classroom collaborator,” not as an “enemy,” seems typical of a tech enthusiast.

Of course, he is right that university professors like me will have to adjust our assignments to involve more in-class exams, classroom work and scaffolded projects with multiple check-ins. As a history professor, I also consciously assign books that are not available on the internet to limit the ability of A.I. tools to respond to essay prompts. For A.I. is the enemy.

What I want, most of all, is for students to read books that help them appreciate the complexity of the past, to digest factual information and to think deeply about the subject. Struggling to find the words and structure to express one’s ideas is a catalyst for thought, as any writer knows.

What can make the college experience transformative is the learning that comes from reflection. Shortcuts, whether traditional plagiarism or this new form of plagiarism, contribute to an atmosphere of intellectual disengagement.

Julie Hessler
Eugene, Ore.

To the Editor:

Kevin Roose builds from a flawed premise: All kids are using A.I., so schools should accept that reality.

We attempted this strategy with cellphones, as teachers tried to use them “productively” for classroom polls and web searches and other such activities. It turns out that letting phones in was a disaster we are still trying to contain.

Let’s not make the same mistake. This doesn’t mean we should never let A.I. in, but we should at least start to do so carefully.

Jeremy Glazer
Philadelphia
The writer is a former high school teacher and a professor at the College of Education at Rowan University.

To the Editor:

Reading Kevin Roose’s column inspired a simple thought experiment. What if a research biologist had developed a highly innovative breed of genetically engineered seeds and, instead of carefully testing them in a restricted area, went out and scattered them at random across the entire countryside? Such a reckless researcher would face a firestorm of condemnation.

Yet isn’t that exactly what the developers of generative A.I. products have done to the landscape of education? With little notice and zero safeguards, they’ve released a product that makes mass cheating easy and often difficult to detect.

The effects on our educational ecosystem are potentially devastating. Where is the outrage over such callous disregard for the consequences of their actions?

Conrad Berger
Hyattsville, Md.

Lawmakers need to deliver a clear “no’’ to union efforts to end the graduation exam.

Without a consistent way to measure student performance in Massachusetts, it’s easy to predict what would occur. Thriving suburban districts would keep thriving. But with no uniform standard for identifying student weaknesses, some kids in underperforming schools would be left without the knowledge and skills they need to succeed at work or college.

Yet, watching the maneuvers of the Massachusetts Teachers Association during the COVID-19 pandemic, one could easily come to the conclusion that the state’s largest union is more concerned with getting the MCAS graduation exam — the state’s main tool for assessing schools’ performance — out of their classrooms than students back in them.

A recent missive from MTA president Merrie Najimy urges MTA members to “inform parents and guardians of their right to opt their children out of testing’’ and to rally round a bill “that would end the MCAS-based graduation requirement.’’

Because the test spotlights schools that need improvement, teachers unions (and some school districts) have never much liked it. But the MTA has now elevated its anti-MCAS campaign to new levels of irresponsibility. Democratic lawmakers should not be enabling or encouraging that effort.

On the former matter, the MTA is leading its members down the pedagogical primrose path regarding the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exams. In fact, there is no such right to opt out of the MCAS, says Colleen Quinn, spokeswoman for the Executive Office of Education. “Every student in grades 3-8 and 10th is required to take the test,’’ she said.

Filed by Senator Joanne Comerford, Democrat of Northampton (and a former campaign director at MoveOn) and Representative James Hawkins, Democrat of Attleboro (and a former Senate district coordinator for the MTA), the MTA’s favored legislation would do away with the test as a graduation requirement and establish a procedure to develop alternative methods of determining student competency. The process alone would make Rube Goldberg green with envy. The bill calls for 25 school district task forces, co-chaired by the local school board chairman and the local teachers union president, which would develop recommendations for consideration by the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment, a union-and-district partnership that opposes the MCAS. The consortium (with the help of an advisory council that would include eight members of the district task forces, with the stipulation that two of those members be appointed by the teachers union) would have two years to issue a report to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education for new competency-determination methods. The predictable result would be to jettison the MCAS in favor of assessment methods that wouldn’t allow meaningful cross-district comparison. At least 32 Democratic legislators have signed aboard as co-sponsors.

That comes on top of MTA efforts to insert a 2021-MCAS-suspending rider into the state budget. Last year, just a few months into the pandemic, the union tried to make eliminating the MCAS graduation requirement a condition of teachers returning to school.

In a statement to the Globe about its anti-MCAS initiatives, Najimy noted that though the union’s anti-MCAS efforts had preceded the pandemic, “the pandemic has laid bare the structural racism at the root of inequities in opportunities and resources in our communities of color.’’

A more apt summation would be that the union is using the pandemic to outfit its long-time anti-MCAS quest in the garb of racial justice. Contending that the MCAS exams have “implicit biases,’’ Najimy continued: “It is long past the time when we should have stopped using them [the exams] to label children of color with racist and dehumanizing terms such as ‘underperforming’ or to focus on manufactured ‘achievement gaps’ and ‘colossal learning loss.’ These labels and terms hearken back to the false eugenics narrative that people of color are intellectually inferior.’’

That is both misleading and denigrative. The underperforming label, of course, is applied to schools, not students. It is certainly true that the MCAS has revealed achievement gaps between different racial groups. (That hard-to-close gap is something Comerford seems sincerely concerned about.) But the MCAS did not, to use Najimy’s term, manufacture the achievement gap; the multi-subject exams merely revealed it for all to see. Nor will nixing the MCAS as a graduation exam close the gap; that action would simply reduce the attention paid to differential rates of achievement.

Further, Najimy’s attempt to reframe the union’s anti-MCAS stance as a matter of racial justice ignores a signal fact: The education reform effort in this state was a bipartisan quest by people of good will and good intentions — prominent among them several progressive Democrats — to improve educational quality for all students.

“It’s both preposterous and despicable that MTA would seek to wrap its anti-accountability campaign in the mantle of racial justice,’’ said Paul Reville, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education who served as secretary of education under Governor Deval Patrick and has been an instrumental figure in the state’s quarter-century education-improvement effort. “The primary purpose of education reform in Massachusetts was and is equity. MCAS shines a light on how much students are learning. It highlights those Black, brown, and other students who are being failed by our education system. It calls attention to their challenges and provides a rationale for giving teachers support they deserve to help their students meet high standards.’’

Now, the MCAS is hardly perfect or foolproof.

But any legislator committed or paying lip service to the MTA’s effort to end the exam as a graduation requirement should educate themselves about this state’s long and largely successful effort to improve educational quality. Prior to the state’s landmark 1993 education-reform law, there were no statewide curriculum standards for public school students. Nor was there a way to tell, beyond the somewhat subjective and self-interested assessment of teachers, whether students were mastering necessary subjects.

The result was that many students graduated from high school without the skills needed for success at work or college. The state’s education-improvement effort created a broad consensus for pairing higher spending with higher standards. As the accountability part of that bargain, the MCAS exams provide a measurement of student achievement that allows comparisons between schools, districts, and demographic cohorts. That approach has paid off, boosting Massachusetts to a nationally recognized (and nationally envied) position of leadership on public education.

The MCAS has, however, created a (locally) unwelcome focus on underperforming schools. It has also aroused the ire of teachers unions by allowing a data-based way to identify poor schools. In subsequent education legislation, the Legislature gave the state commissioner of education enhanced authority to force changes in those schools, sometimes by pushing to alter aspects of the local union contracts. Because those efforts are based on a school’s MCAS scores, state interventions have also heightened union opposition to the MCAS.

Now, it’s a natural tendency of unions to want to shield their members from change, accountability, and competition. That, however, is where legislators should be expected to display some backbone. Moving to the sort of system the MTA advocates, where there is no uniform standard to judge whether students have mastered their coursework, runs the very real risk of letting nation-leading Massachusetts lapse back to its pre-education-reform days.

That’s not to say the MCAS shouldn’t be periodically re-examined. Occasionally a question turns up that is racially or culturally objectionable or oblivious; those questions, obviously, should be expunged. It’s also worth considering complementary measures of student performance. But Paul Toner, president of the MTA from 2010 to 2014 (and the union vice-president before that), makes two important points about such an effort.

First, eliminating any uniform standard by which students can be assessed risks undermining the broad statewide consensus that supports the large budgetary investment Massachusetts has made in its schools. Second, any alternative competency-determination standard should be developed and evaluated before, not after, eliminating the MCAS as a graduation requirement.

“You need to have the alternative first,’’ said Toner, now senior director for national policy and partnerships at Teach Plus. “You don’t stop the train while you figure it out.’’

That message, from a well-regarded former MTA president who hails from an era when the MTA was considered a collaborative and serious-minded partner in education-improvement efforts, is one MTA members need to hear today. Democratic legislators, meanwhile, need to send a clear message of their own. Yes, the MTA may be a valued member of the party’s electoral coalition, but when it comes to education policy, lawmakers have to put the considered best interests of the state’s schoolchildren above union concerns.

Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us on Twitter at @GlobeOpinion. https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?artguid=ff5f807a-19a9-4647-99e2-0fe3ea1c6570&appid=1165

The Washington Post reports on August 14, 2023, that university professors after November first began to see students’ papers that “looked like they were written by a machine,” and had factual errors, and statements weren’t documented by the source.

One high school teacher reports that middle school teachers just feel students’ writing that doesn’t totally match their in-class writing could just be the same as a parent or sibling helping out with writing. The high school teachers are giving harsh penalties to students’ written work that appears to be created by putting words into ChatGPT. Word of punishment for using ChatGPT as an easy substitute for research, thinking, and writing on their own will get around, is the thinking.

The Washington Post reports that setting a university policy on ChatGPT would be a “daunting task,” because, as with other school policies, some professors would want to address a ChatGPT policy as a teaching tool, others want ChatGPT banned from their classes, and there exists a range of views in between.

So far, teachers use “GPTzero” as a tool, such as “Turnitin.com”, to detect the AI writing, teachers contrive a specific prompt or writing question that would be hard for ChatGPT to write well on; compare students’ in-class writing with the submitted paper; or ask the student questions on the topic to see if the student seems to have done the research and writing himself or herself. When I checked with parents of a student with dysgraphia, the inability to write, even form letters (he’s good at keyboarding), they didn’t want their son anywhere near ChatGPT, rightfully believing that this otherwise good student would use it as a handy crutch, and not learn how to do valid research, thinking and developing writing on his own.

After reading this Washington Post article below, please reply here, at “leave a comment,” with questions you still have on ChatGPT, and/or your own solutions that work or don’t work. Sharing thoughts on this fraught issue can be helpful!

The Washington Post Democracy Dies in Darkness

“Professors have a summer assignment: Prevent ChatGPT chaos” August, 2023

AI chatbots have triggered a panic among educators, who are flooding listservs, webinars and professional conferences to figure out how to deal with the technology

By Pranshu Verma

August 13, 2023

Soon after ChatGPT was released in November, Darren Keast noticed students in his college English composition class turning in essays that “read as if they’d been written by machine.” Many contained fabricated quotes and cited sources that didn’t exist — telltale signs they were created by the artificial intelligence chatbot. He’s dreading a repeat of that confusion this fall, so he scrambled over summer break to adapt.

While hiking in Costa Rica, Keast consumed AI podcasts talking about the software’s existential risk to humanity. At home in Mill Valley, Calif., he’s spent hours online in fiery group discussions about whether AI chatbots should be used in the classroom. In the car, Keast queried his kids for their thoughts on the software until they begged him to stop.

“They’re like: ‘You got to get a life, this is getting crazy,’” he said. “But [AI] totally transformed my whole professional experience.”

Keast isn’t alone.The rise of AI chatbots has sowed confusion and panic among educators who worry they are ill-equipped to incorporate the technology into their classes and fear a stark rise in plagiarism and reduced learning. Absent guidance from university administrators on how to deal with the software,many teachers are taking matters into their own hands, turning to listservs, webinars and professional conferences to fill in gaps in their knowledge — many shelling out their own money to attend conference sessions that are packed to the brim.

Even with this ad hoc education, there is little consensus among educators: for every professor who touts the tool’s wonders there’s another that says it will bring about doom.

A professor accused his class of using ChatGPT, putting diplomas in jeopardy

The lack of consistency worries them. When students come back to campus this fall, some teachers will allow AI, but others will ban it. Some universities will have modified their dishonesty policies to take AI into account, but others avoid the subject. Teachers may rely on inadequate AI-writing detection tools and risk wrongly accusing students, or opt for student surveillance software, to ensure original work.

Keast is worried about artificial intelligence’s impact on his classroom this fall.

For Keast, who teaches at the City College of San Francisco, there’s only one word to describe the next semester.

“Chaotic,” he said.

After ChatGPT became public on Nov. 30, it created a stir. The AI chatbot could spit out lifelike responses to any question — crafting essays, finishing computer code or writing poems.

Educators knew immediately they were facing a generational shift for the classroom. Many professors worried that students would use it for homework and tests. Others compared the technology to the calculator, arguing teachers would have to provide assignments that could be completed with AI.

Institutions such as Sciences Po, a university in Paris, and RV University in Bangalore, India, banned ChatGPT, concerned it would undermine learning and encourage cheating. Professors at colleges such as the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and Ithaca College in New York allowed it, arguing that students should be proficient in it.

Tools to detect AI-written content have added to the turmoil. They are notoriously unreliable and have resulted in what students say are false accusations of cheating and failing grades. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, unveiled an AI-detection tool in January, but quietly scrapped it on July 20 due to its “low rate of accuracy.” One of the most prominent tools to detect AI-written text, created by plagiarism detection company Turnitin.com, frequently flagged human writing as AI-generated, according to a Washington Post examination.

Representatives from OpenAI pointed to an online post stating they “are currently researching more effective provenance techniques for text.” Turnitin.com did not respond to a request for comment.

We tested a new ChatGPT-detector for teachers. It flagged an innocent student.

Students are adjusting their behavior to avoid getting impacted by the uncertainty.

Jessica Zimny, a student at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Tex., said she was wrongly accused of using AI to cheat this summer. A 302-word post she wrote for a political science class assignment was flagged as 67 percent AI-written, according to Turnitin.com’s detection tool — resulting in her professor giving her a zero.

Jessica Zimny, a sophomore at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Tex., said she was wrongly accused of using AI to cheat this summer.

Zimny, 20, said she plead her case to her professor, the head of the school’s political science department and a university dean, to no avail.

Now, she screen-records herself doing assignments — capturing ironclad proof she did the work in case she ever is ever accused again, she said.

“I don’t like the idea that people are thinking that my work is copied, or that I don’t do my own things originally,” Zimny, a fine arts student, said. “It just makes me mad and upset and I just don’t want that to happen again.”

On Turnitin.com, one of Jessica Zimny’s assignment for her summer political science class was incorrectly flagged as being 67% written by AI.

All of this has left professors hungry for guidance, knowing their students will be using ChatGPT when the fall rolls around, said Anna Mills, a writing teacher at the College of Marin who sits on a joint AI task force with the Modern Language Association (MLA) and College Conference on Composition and Communication (CCCC).

Because universities aren’t providing much help, professors are flocking to informal online discussion groups, professional development webinars and conferences for information.

Teachers are on alert for inevitable cheating after release of ChatGPT

When Mills talked on a webinar hosted by the MLA and CCCC for AI in writing in late-July, a time when many teachers might be in the throes of summer break, more than 3,000 people signed up and ultimately more than 1,700 people tuned in — unusual numbers for the groups’ trainings.

“It speaks to the sense of anxiety,” Mills said. In fact, a survey of 456 college educators in March and April conducted by the task force revealed the largest worries professors have about AI are its role in fostering plagiarism, the inability to detect AI-written text and that the technology would prevent students from learning how to write, learn and develop critical thinking skills.

Mills and her task force colleagues are trying to clear up misconceptions. They explain that it’s not easy to recognize AI-generated text and caution the use of software to crack down on student plagiarism. Mills said AI is not only a tool used for cheating, but can be harnessed to spur critical thinking and learning.

“People are overwhelmed and recognizing that this new situation demands a lot of time and careful attention, and it’s very complex,” she added. “There are not easy answers to it.”

Anna Mills, on screen, and other members of the AI and Writing Task Force during an in-person retreat at Google Learning Center in New York City. Task Force Members gathered to set priorities, meet with organizational leaders, and finalize its first working paper. (MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI)

Marc Watkins, an academic innovation fellow and writing lecturer at the University of Mississippi, said teachers are keenly aware that if they don’t learn more about AI, they may rob their students of a tool that could aid learning. That’s why they’re seeking professional development on their own, even if they have to pay for it or take time away from families.

Watkins, who helped create an AI-focused professional development course at his university, recalled a lecture he gave on how to use AI in the classroom at a conference in Nashville this summer. The interest was so intense, he said, that more than 200 registered educators clamored for roughly 70 seats, forcing conference officials to shut the door early to prevent over crowding.

Cheating-detection companies made millions during the pandemic. Now students are fighting back.

Watkins advises professors to follow a few steps. They should rid themselves of the notion that banning ChatGPT will do much, since the tool is publicly available. Rather, they should set limitations on how it can be used in class and have a conversation with students early in the semester about the ways chatbots could foster nuanced thinking on an assignment.

For example, Watkins said, ChatGPT can help students brainstorm questions they go onto investigate, or create counterarguments to strengthen their essays.

But several professors added that getting educators to think on the same page is a daunting task, that is unlikely for the fall semester. Professional development modules must be developed to explain how teachers talk to students about AI, how to incorporate it into learning, and what to do when students are flagged as writing an entire post by a chatbot.

Watkins said if colleges don’t figure out how to deal with AI quickly, there is a possibility colleges rely on surveillance tools, such as they did during the pandemic, to track student keystrokes, eye movements and screen activity, to ensure students are doing the work.

“It sounds like hell to me,” he said.

 

 

By Pranshu Verma

Pranshu Verma is a reporter on The Washington Post’s technology team. Before joining The Post in 2022, he covered technology at the Boston Globe. Before that, he was a reporting fellow at the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

                      Addressing Student Behavior in Post-Covid Era

Many are finding students’ class behaviors challenging, from students not having been in school during the covid shutdown at a time of their formative years. How can we re-orient students to school?

I learned little from the teacher I taught with during my student teaching, so it was pretty much sink or swim, but she did make one comment I thought was good thinking. She said, “I don’t like that student. That’s why I’m really nice to him.” It worked. What could have been a lot of tug and pull, recalcitrance, annoyance, instead was an ease in interaction.  

Conferring with others on strategies to re-build that necessary positive in-class behavior in order to move learning along, can help. Also, using those covid era strategies of calling home, emailing the student and families, simply not hearing some “backtalk” comments, smothering a student with love, all can help.

We try any means necessary. Pulling a student aside before or after class, having a supportive after-school two-way talk, and continuing to monitor, can help. One-on-one two-way discussion establishes a better relationship, especially when the student sees that the teacher cares.  Allowing that student to shine works wonders. Positives work. A teacher tells me he has recalcitrant or disruptive students sit outside the classroom until the student says he or she is ready to have cooperative behavior. Apparently administrators don’t patrol his area.

The great clinical psychologist Harvard professor Fred Jones has an abundance of class strategies to monitor behavior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfGttNFuaWw  

Fred Jones Tools for Teaching  https://www.fredjones.com › single-post › 2016/11/09

Samples of Professor Jones’ sage advice are:

         Responding to Backtalk: When in Doubt, Do Nothing.

         It takes one fool to backtalk. It takes two fools to make a conversation out of it.

         Open your mouth, and slit your throat.

Teamwork and conferring with colleagues can help. When we all pull together to strive for those earlier better behaviors, and aim to move forward for even better work today, this teamwork can be key. Collaboration can help immensely to move to the better learning environment needed today. When I was team-teaching, my co-teacher, who’d attended boarding school, only knew how to treat students with respect, because that was how students had been treated in his earlier school. This respect was reciprocated.

Always, of course, it’s what works for us. Trial and error can be the path to a class that’s working well, which we all prefer, and allows for the good teaching we all want to have.

    ~ Kay