ChatGPT-Wary Universities Scramble to Prepare for New School Year
ChatGPT set the academic world ablaze after it was introduced in November, when the AI chatbot suddenly gave students a hard-to-detect shortcut for completing essays and assignments. Nine months later, as a new school year nears, many universities are still crafting their response.
Colleges around the world spent much of the previous academic year adopting ad hoc approaches to the software — or no policy at all. Some professors banned the use of it outright, citing plagiarism, while others looked to incorporate it more intentionally into their curriculum. That led to inconsistent approaches across classes and departments.
The situation is only slowly changing now: Without clear guidelines that apply to various departments, universities risk repeating the free-for-all they experienced during 2023 final exams. But many are realizing they need to find a way to live with artificial intelligence.
“It's moving so quickly,” said Eric Fournier, director of educational development at Washington University in St. Louis. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in under two months, leaving academic officials in the dark as students latched on to the technology. “It went from curiosity to panic to a grudging acceptance that these tools are here,” he said.
From the outset, professors suspected that students were cheating, said Madison White, a student at Stetson University. “Without professors fully looking into the software, they often immediately assumed that it was a hack for students to get away from doing readings or homework.”
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, developed by the Microsoft Corp. -backed startup OpenAI, are fed vast amounts of data and then use that training to answer users' queries — often with eerie accuracy. The software
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