I've been spending a lot of time thinking about #ChatGPT and academic assessment and why I am not so concerned about it (at the college level). It's not that ChatGPT is bad for education. It's that our education system is built upon a basis wherein we do assessment wrong.
What @hoffman writes in his blog below comes close to how I think of things (thanks for saving me a lot of time writing my thoughts down!)
http://write.guyhoffman.com/why-i-dont-care-if-students-use-gpt
Don't ban ChatGPT from schools. ChatGPT has just made it painfully obvious that academic assessment is broken and academic student incentives have become tied to assessment.
The disturbing thing is that education experts *know* that assessment is broken, and has been for more than a century. But the solution is expensive.
@Riedl Banning ChatGPT is seriously luddite... like banning calculators was once done.
@Riedl What would be the solution? (Or some keywords so I could look the subject up). I'm far from a specialist, but it's difficult to me to imagine how academic assessment would be radically different.
@Riedl the truth is that a simple 1-1 interview, a simple chat, with someone on a subject, maybe structured around a "pretext" question/problem, if of sufficient length, can be a very good indicator of his mastery of a subject. It's very easy to academically assess someone. Problem is time/scale.
@Riedl @hoffman Now that I've read the article, Hoffman is correct, but he also passes the buck on the matter of professional success. If the student doesn't learn, his fellow professionals (or his conscience) are expected to weed him out, not Uni. It is somewhat assumed that he's hurting himself. He won't be able to rise/succeed if he hasn't learned, it's his loss. But life (and work) is not like that. The odds are different for a learned professional vs a bad one, but not *that* different.