Artificial intelligence will change the day-to-day and the examination culture at higher education institutions – that is now a fact. Not only can chatbots like ChatGPT create comprehensive texts but they can also be used creatively in seminars and for studying.
Published on 2 August 2023
Already shortly after the public release of ChatGPT in November, Professor Dr. Andreas Fuchs, Professor of Marketing and Digital Business at THWS, knew that a lot will change by it. Thus, shortly after Christmas, he invited colleagues to a meeting. In front of the audience, he asked a professor to use ChatGPT to lay out the basis of a scientific assignment – including thesis, research question and introduction. This caused great astonishment among the professors. "Then it clicked: We have to act now. We must appoint a working group fpor this topic", Fuchs reports. "Because this is going to spread so exponentially that we need frameworks for the faculties."
The chatbot ChatGPT was released on 30 November 2022 by the Silicon Valley company OpenAI. One of the co-founders is Elon Musk. Ever since, everybody can interact online with the chatbot, that is based on an artificial intelligence. Users must simply enter questions or prompts in a dialogue window. The artificial intelligence answers nearly everything. The software can explain, program, and make arguments. And everything uttered in neat sentences – which a built-in grammar system ensures. In the first two months, over 100 million users signed up. This makes ChatGPT the user application with the fastest growth of all time.
At THWS, there currently still is a discussion about consequences. But one thing is for sure. You cannot stop AI-based programmes like ChatGPT from entering higher education, you can only shape it. Professor Dr. Fuchs, who is chairing the working group "Artificial intelligence in teaching", sees primarily two areas that need clarification: "For one, exams and final theses. We need decision-making bases that cover for example how to deal with a student who has used AI in their master's thesis", Fuchs says. "And the second one is the use of AI in teaching. This is really exciting because it is not only a risk but also a chance."
Consequences for exams and final theses
In future, lecturers will not be able to distinguish whether an assignment paper was created or at least supported by an artificial intelligence. "Hence, we must ask ourselves: What is being evaluated?", Fuchs says. Together with the working group, he is looking for answers to this question, that could involve focussing on methodology or the interpretation of results. "A master's thesis is less about the state of knowledge you compile, but more about how you approach the problem. There are many more skills that you acquire than simply learning more about the topic."
As an artificial intelligence, ChatGPT does not have a right to intellectual property, as a legal opinion by the Universities of Bochum and Münster has laid out recently. As the bot was, however, trained using real texts, text blocks might be considered plagiarism. Users of ChatGPT must therefore examine the answers carefully and might have to look for correct references themselves. For text passages from ChatGPT the same as for any other source applies: Sources must be clearly indicated.
Professor Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Biedermann, who teaches Cybersecurity at the Faculty of Computer Science and Business Information Systems, the questions is less about how to grade master's theses but more about how to handle examinations. He has already started to change his assignments in a way that makes them less suitable for answering by misuse of AI-generated texts or program codes. "I like to create gamification competitions for my students. If someone cheats by using ChatGPT, that would be disappointing. I try to bypass that." What is clear to him: Banning it is impossible, as is ignoring it. "The development is here, and it is here to stay. And now you have to check how to integrate it in a reasonable way." This would also require training the professors.
Media competence is gaining importance
What applies to Google also applies to ChatGPT: Not everything the software produces is correct. Thus, students must learn to categorise the information that chatbot issues. "It is important to develop awareness for using ChatGPT", Biedermann says. And in some cases ChatGPT is completely off. Because the bot-generated texts are not based on sound analyses, they simply are reproduced text templates that have been programmed before. You should thus not blindly trust the facts nor the sources, even if they seem authentic at the first glance.
Exactly this is what Professor Dr. Fuchs wants to practise with his students. "We had a marketing task for which students had to enter a prompt. We then consciously examined the results we got and scrutinised them." Higher education institutions now had the responsibility to show students what technologies like ChatGPT could achieve in five to ten years' time. "We as higher education institution are – in addition to what one absorbs at home and at school – one of the few institutions that can help our students develop critical thinking. That is why it's so important for us to concern ourselves with these topics," Fuchs says.
ChatGPT as a study aid
But chatbots like ChatGPT also offer opportunities for teaching and studying. They offer the chance of personalised learning experiences by answering individual questions and providing tailored contents. Pauline Weber, student in the THWS master's programme in Digital Business Systems, is currently completing her semester abroad in the Netherlands. At the moment, she uses ChatGPT nearly every day. For her courses, she has to read lots of academic articles in English. "I like to have ChatGPT summarise the texts for me, or have it translate the texts from German to English or vice versa. I specifically ask it to explain concepts I haven't understood, or let it generate texts out of bullet points." Also in her course on biological psychology, the chatbot helps her in understanding the topic. "Chemistry has never been my strong suit. Whenever I read an article on it, I am on ChatGPT at the same time and ask, for example: What are the motor cortex and somatosensory cortex functions? Answer in short."
Artificial intelligence will change a lot still
So, there are numerous ways to use chatbots in higher education. It only needs some initial training until one learns to ask the right questions and to feed the programme with the required information. The introduction of AI to research and teaching leads to change and questions all previous processes and long-established thinking patterns. And yet, we are still at the very beginning.
In short: ChatGPT can be a useful tool if used as a source of ideas, reference work, or inspiration. You should still not trust the answers blindly. To achieve a balance of human interaction and technological assistance, the higher education institutions are now called upon to shape the responsible use of ChatGPT and AI in higher education.
ChatGPT - artificial intelligence for natural language processing
ChatGPT is a publicly accessible AI-based software platform of the company OpenAI, that was founded specifically for the processing of natural language. ChatGPT is a tool that enables its users to communicate with AI-controlled text models in a simple and interactive way. Until 2021, the platform was trained with vast amounts of text from the internet and e-books. After receiving the prompt from the user, ChatGPT takes on various tasks. Among them generating text, creating summaries, or translating texts, and programming. The training data upon which ChatGPT is based can, however, lead to inaccuracies and prejudices which can be problematic.
Commented list of links of the Hochschulforum Digitalisierung (in German)