- #36
Ken G
Gold Member
- 4,897
- 538
By the way, I really welcome ChatGPT in the classroom. If you think about it, the fact that ChatGPT often gives quite good answers to general introductory level physics and astronomy questions (not mathematical logic, mind you, it's not good at that at all so here I'm talking about lower level classes that do not include much mathematical reasoning), yet does not have any deeper understanding of those answers, means that it simulates the kind of student that can get an A by parroting what they have heard without understanding it at all. The way ChatGPT fools us into thinking it understands its own explanations, is exactly the problem we should be trying to avoid in our students. The worst part is, sometimes our students don't even realize they are only fooling us, because we have trained them to fool themselves as well. We tell them an answer, then ask them the question, and give them an A when they successfully repeat the answer we gave them before. They walk away thinking they learned something, and we think they learned something. But don't dig into their understanding, don't ask them a question which calls on them to think beyond what we told them, if you don't want to dispell this illusion!
Hence, the way to defeat using ChatGPT as a cheat engine is the same as the way to dispell the illusion of understanding where there is not understanding: ask the follow on question, dig into what has been parroted. That's actually one of the things that often happens in this forum, we start with some seemingly simple question, and get a seemingly straightforward answer, but after a few more posts it quickly becomes clear that there was more to the question than what was originally intended by the asker. If we teach students to dig, we are teaching them science. If we teach them to do what ChatGPT does, we cannot complain that ChatGPT can be used to cheat!
Hence, the way to defeat using ChatGPT as a cheat engine is the same as the way to dispell the illusion of understanding where there is not understanding: ask the follow on question, dig into what has been parroted. That's actually one of the things that often happens in this forum, we start with some seemingly simple question, and get a seemingly straightforward answer, but after a few more posts it quickly becomes clear that there was more to the question than what was originally intended by the asker. If we teach students to dig, we are teaching them science. If we teach them to do what ChatGPT does, we cannot complain that ChatGPT can be used to cheat!