Final exams with ChatGPT

Hi, I’m Eari Nakano, an intern reporting on technology in San Francisco and a rising senior at the University of Southern California. I’ll t [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hi, I’m Eari Nakano, an intern reporting on technology in San Francisco and a rising senior at the University of Southern California. I’ll tell you how much ChatGPT has upended the academic experience. But first… Three things you need to know today: • US regulators sued Amazon [for making it hard to cancel Prime]( • Twitter is [paying its Google Cloud bills again]( • The US [warned of China’s IP theft “playbook”]( Testing out The day ChatGPT launched on Nov. 30 was the same day a friend at college taught me how to use it. I stress tested it with an essay question I had completed for an assignment earlier that semester. ChatGPT’s answer was accurate but too short. My friend said I was doing it wrong and suggested a new prompt: “respond to this in a 1,500-word scholarly essay.” Almost immediately, ChatGPT spit out something quite scholarly and in the process, dramatically changed academic life at my school and at many others. Here was a secret weapon. The school board and professors had no idea how good it was. No policies existed at the time, so why wouldn’t students use it? My classmates at USC were generally smart enough to not copy-paste the chatbot’s responses verbatim. It’s more about efficiency. It helps with text summarization, writes report introductions and explains mathematical concepts. (Just don’t treat it like a calculator. It’s pretty bad at math.) I didn’t hear from a single instructor about the tool until January: “What is that?” my politics professor asked when overhearing some chatter in the classroom. Soon, a mild crackdown commenced. Professors started using [artificial intelligence detection software]( like GPTZero and Turnitin, but careful edits to the chatbot responses can easily circumvent these tools. Some students would even run their papers through plagiarism checkers to confirm they’d changed enough words to evade detection. By Feb. 13, USC made an ambiguous proclamation. The university basically left it up to professors to decide whether they’ll be “embracing and enhancing or discouraging and detecting students’ use of this technology.” A lot of them chose the latter option. Many professors reintroduced blue book exams, a type of handwritten test administered in class, and instituted browser lockdown tests, which use special software to freeze all other tabs. One professor pleaded with us before a take-home exam, “Please don’t use AI to complete this assignment.” Final exams last month were a free-for-all. But students could hardly be blamed for using a tool that saves them time, seems fairly harmless and improves the final product. For people older than me, the debate around ChatGPT might sound a little like those that took place when graphing calculators or the internet were introduced. Still, I’ve observed that ChatGPT can affect students’ work ethic and their creativity. The classes where I was forced to fill out blue books probably pushed me the most academically. I didn’t realize how reliant I had become on the internet as a whole until I was stranded in a classroom with a pen and paper. It will take some studying and creativity on the part of the educators to figure out how to incorporate AI into the learning process. Much like the way algebra and geometry curriculums were rewritten for the TI-86, professors will need to figure out which tasks are fundamental to a person’s academic foundation and which can be left to a bot. —[Eari Nakano](mailto:enakano7@bloomberg.net) The big story Two years ago, US lawmakers created a $14.2 billion fund to help low-income families across America pay for internet service they would otherwise struggle to afford. The money is likely to be exhausted by early next year, and the program could [fail to win renewal from Congress](. One to watch [Watch the Bloomberg Technology TV interview]( with Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Vijay Pande on AI in health care. Get fully charged JPMorgan named Teresa Heitsenrether [head of a new data and analytics unit](, part of an AI push that the CEO has called “critical to our company’s future success.” Academics are using modern tech to [read the secret messages]( of history’s serial killers and imprisoned royalty. 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