A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

This is nice, but it's not at all how students use ChatGPT (anecdotal based on my kid and her friends who are at the uni right now).

The way they actually use is to get ChatGPT to generate ALL their homework and submit that. And sometimes take home exams too. And the weird thing is that some professors are perfectly cool with it.

I am starting to question whether the cost of going to a place of higher learning is worth it.

Why do they get homework then? I don’t expect the professors are willing to go over and correct autogenerated LLM homework. The purpose of homework is to apply and cement knowledge. In some cases homework is so excessive that students find ways to cheat. If homework is reasonable, students can just do it and bypass LLMs altogether (at least for the purpose of the homework).

The point of the article is to highlight how students should be using ChatGPT.

Now it's up to you to share it with your kid and convince them they shouldn't cheat themselves out of an education by offloading the learning part to an LLM.

This doesn't change the value provided by the institution they're enrolled in unless the teachers are offloading their jobs to LLMs in a way that's detrimental to the students.

Cheating has been and will always be a thing.

You are preaching to the choir here. But with cheating being so trivial and time saving, I think we will simply see more and more of it.

As a professor it's frustrating. We want to give homework feedback for the students that actually put the work in, but we know that half the submissions are plagiarized from chatgpt, which is a waste of both their and my time.

Some people see it as not worth and too boring to understand and actually solve it. I had a few friends of mine that I used to teach in our course work. For some of the fundamental classes for stem (e.g. Probability and Stats), even though I tried to show him a way to arrive at the solutions, he tried to ask directly for the solutions instead of arriving at them by himself.

The same thing was true for probably me when I was studying geography and history in my high school years since they were taught largely by a collection of trivia knowledge that I did not find interesting. I would have used chatgpt and be done rather than studying them. But, when I took the courses that covered the same topics in history in my university, it was more enjoyable because the main instructor was covering the topic to tell a story in a more engaging manner (e.g. he was imitating some of the historical figures, it was very funny :))