A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

I have been working with colleagues to develop advice on how to adapt teaching methods in the face of widespread use of LLMs by students.

The first point I like to make is that the purpose of having students do tasks is to foster their development. That may sound obvious, but many people don't seem to take notice that the products of student activities are worthless in themselves. We don't have students do push-ups in gym class to help the national economy by meeting some push-up quota. The sole reason for them is to promote physical development. The same principle applies to mental tasks. When considering LLM use, we need to be looking at its effects on student development rather than on student output.

So, what is actually new about LLM use? There has always been a risk that students would sometimes submit homework that was actually the work of someone else, but LLMs enable willing students to do it all the time. Teachers can adapt to this by basing evaluation only on work done in class, and by designing homework to emphasize feedback on key points, so that students will get some learning benefit even though a LLM did the work.

Completely following this advice may seem impossible, because some important forms of work done for evaluation require too much time. Teachers use papers and projects to challenge students in a more elaborate way than is possible in class. These can still be used beneficially if a distinction is made between work done for learning and work done for evaluation. While students develop multiple skills while working on these extended tasks, those skills could be evaluated in class by more concise tasks with a narrower focus. For example, good writing requires logical coherence and rhetorical flow. If students have trouble in these areas, it will be just as evident in a brief essay as a long one.

It is trivially easy to spot AI writing if you are familiar with it, but if it requires failing most of the class for turning in LLM generated material, I think we are going to find that abolishing graded homework is the only tenable solution.

The student's job is not to do everything the teacher says, it is to get through schooling somewhat intact and ready for their future. The sad fact is that many things we were forced to do in school were not helpful at all, and only existed because the teachers thought it was, or for no real reason at all.

Pretending that pedagogy has established and verified methodology that will result in a completely developed student, if only the student did the work as prescribed, is quite silly.

Teaching evolves with technology like every other part of society and it may come out worse or it may come out better, but I don't want to go back fountain pens and slide rules and I think in 20 years this generation won't look back on their education thinking they got a worse one than we did because they could cheat easier.

Does pedagogy have established and verified methodology that will result in a completely PHYSICALLY developed student, if only the student does the EXERCISE as prescribed? No, but we still see the value in physical activity to promote healthy development.

> many things we were forced to do in school were not helpful at all

I've never had to do push-ups since leaving school. It was a completely useless skill to spend time on. Gym class should have focused on lifting bags of groceries or other marketable skill.

You haven't proved that it made a difference or that doing something else wouldn't have been as or more effective, which is my point. You did it, so these students must do it, with no other rationale than that.

You have forgotten that pedagogy is based on science and research. That is why it is effective for the masses. Anecdotal evidence will never refute the result. Take learning to read, for example. While you can learn to read in a number of ways, some of which are quite unusual, such as memorising the whole picture book and its sound, research has clearly shown that using the phonics approach is the most effective. Or take maths. It's obvious that some people are good at maths, even if they don't seem to do much work. But research has shown time and time again that to be good at maths you need to practice, including doing homework.

So learning to recognise the phonics and blend them together may not be better for one pupil, but it is clearly better for most. This is what the curriculum and most teachers' classroom practice is all about.