With ChatGPT, is the college essay dead?

[gmax137]

basically technobabble: grammatically complete sentences with a collection of technical sounding words that don't sum to a coherent thought

so, advertising copy... "buy something"

 

[Pythagorean]

...grammatically complete sentences with a collection of technical sounding words that don't sum to a coherent thought....

So... perfect for marketing?

 

[gleem]

This article appeared in Physics Education this past April

"The death of the short-form physics essay in the coming AI revolution"​

The course used for the study was Physics in Society.

Abstract​

The latest AI language modules can produce original, high quality full short-form (300-word) Physics essays within seconds. These technologies such as ChatGPT and davinci-003 are freely available to anyone with an internet connection. In this work, we present evidence of AI generated short-form essays achieving First-Class grades on an essay writing assessment from an accredited, current university Physics module. The assessment requires students answer five open-ended questions with a short, 300-word essay each. Fifty AI answers were generated to create ten submissions that were independently marked by five separate markers. The AI generated submissions achieved an average mark of

, in strong agreement with the current module average of

. A typical AI submission would therefore most-likely be awarded a First Class, the highest classification available at UK universities. Plagiarism detection software returned a plagiarism score between

% (Grammarly) and

% (TurnitIn). We argue that these results indicate that current natural language processing AI represent a significant threat to the fidelity of short-form essays as an assessment method in Physics courses.

 

[symbolipoint]

Thanks. I only read the "Abstract" you posted.
Can the teacher(or whoever authority) verify each essay? Like verify that an identified person wrote each essay.

Some essays are assigned to be written in-person and supervised*. All the work must be manually written using paper and pen and the result is given to the essay tester, proctor, or whoever. That should be part of how to verify that real people are doing real genuine work.*Or is this now obsolete?

 

[gleem]

Can the teacher(or whoever authority) verify each essay? Like verify that an identified person wrote each essay.

In the study, the essay markers knew the essays were AI-generated.