Caught off Guard by AI, Professors scrambled to react to ChatGPT this spring — and started planning

Shelby Kendrick, a teaching assistant at the University of California at Berkeley, started playing around with ChatGPT in February, a few months after the large language model appeared, making headlines for turning out relatively high-quality prose in response to just a few basic prompts.

The knowledge she gained came in handy this spring, when she, two other TAs, and a professor suspected some students of using ChatGPT in their survey course on the history of architecture. They would soon learn that students had used it in a range of ways. A couple had typed an assignment prompt into ChatGPT and submitted the AI essay with no changes. Others had directed it to write more tailored papers, with arguments and examples they provided. Still others used it to help generate ideas but copied a lot of the text ChatGPT had produced into their work. And a few students, most of whom spoke English as a second language, used it to polish their writing. Read More