AI (Artificial Intelligence) in Higher Education

A best practice is to design assessments that focus on higher-order thinking skills and require students to demonstrate their understanding and application of knowledge in meaningful ways. Check out this article from Inside Higher Education: Embracing Constructive Dialogue and Oral Assessments in the Age of AI.

Below are some points to consider [from MHS Library].

Check assessment task design against Generative AI tools: 

It can be useful to ‘test’ whether your assessments are designed in a way where they can be easily completed by artificial intelligence. For example, it is possible to register an account and explore the capabilities and limitations of ChatGPT. Note: Creating an account and using ChatGPT provides additional data to OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT.

These activities could be used to assist in reviewing how amenable an assignment is to being answered by ChatGPT:

• Paste an entire assignment brief into chatGPT and see what it produces
• After reviewing the result, add additional instructions into ChatGPT to try to finetune the results.
• Sometimes, poor results are due to entering insufficient prompts into ChatGPT rather than because ChatGPT cannot produce a satisfactory response to an assignment. Test this by adding further instructions derived from the assessment rubric, marking guide, and taught material. Try a variety of combinations of instructions and see if this improves the results.

Notes for testing ChatGPT results:

• For many assignments, ChatGPT will produce a reasonable-looking structure but will often lack precise details in some areas and may contain factual inaccuracies or non-existent references. In many cases, ChatGPT will ignore some instructions even with additional prompting.

• When reviewing assignment instructions, the instructions given to ChatGPT can be repeatedly updated in an attempt to produce a satisfactory answer. ChatGPT is able to follow simple instructions
• CHatGPT provides answers that have a layer of correctness, but it is currently poor at contextualizing responses. ChatGPT is a language model that provides responses based on statistical convergence rather than interpreting instructions in the way a human would. It is currently poor at ranking the importance of different instructions, or of prioritising specific elements, without human prompting.

In a precalculus class, a student used ChatGPT to generate a rap about vectors and trigonometry in the style of Kanye West, while geometry students used the program to write mathematical proofs in the style of raps, which they performed in a classroom competition. In an English class, students were allowed to read Shakespeare’s Othello by using ChatGPT to translate lines into modern English to help them understand the text, so that they could spend class time discussing the plot and themes. 

Students were asked to critique a ChatGPT-generated essay comparing George Orwell's 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale. A high school Honors English teacher had students critique a ChatGPT-generated essay on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and the teacher said, “My students have never been so engaged in writing, They wanted to beat the computer” and were “tearing apart” the AI-generated essay."
[from The Creative Ways Teachers Are Using ChatGPT in the Classroom]

One professor shared that they have students include a reflective statement, explaining how they used AI in writing their papers. Another suggested to teach the students what is acceptable, such as using AI as a tool to generate ideas, and not as a tool to write their papers for them.  

Ideas on how to use chatGPT in classroom:

• Ask ChatGPT to write in other styles (e.g., Thread, op-ed, poem), then compare and contrast its results to student-authored examples
• Ask students to discuss a question in class, get an answer from ChatGPT, and then have students analyze how ChatGPT’s answer compares to theirs
• Ask ChatGPT (or other AI tools such as AgentGPT, Jasper Art, or midjourney) to create materials in formats such as images, comics, diagrams and then ask students to discuss and improve on them
• As an early assignment in a class, look at AI-generated content, and then discuss how the AI content falls short. This discussion provides the opportunity to explain how academic writing, including elements such as the use of sources, argumentation, and critical thinking, looks differently in your discipline