A couple of years ago we were all terribly concerned about the fact that a lot of American high schools are assigning such crushing homework loads that some kids literally don't have enough time to eat or sleep (and all this in spite of the fact that there's no good evidence that assigning homework actually improves academic outcomes at the pre-university level), but now we're hearing stories about those same schools struggling to stop kids from using ChatGPT to write their essays and suddenly It's The Children Who Are Wrong. Like, do you think maybe there's a certain level of cause and effect in play here?
i keep trying to explain to people that teenagers are making mostly rational decisions based on the information they have, and no one seems to believe me
you probably won't be surprised at the pushback I've gotten from teachers at the college level (who by and large don't have to worry about NCLB guidelines and tests) at suggesting that if critical thinking is the problem being lost, maybe we should change our testing and assessment styles to directly measure critical thinking on the fly rather than throwing up our hands and blaming TECHNOLOGY
the trick is that these assessment styles often require more work to think about and construct assessments for and that is work that college instructors are typically compensated very poorly if at all for, so like, I get it. but that's how you fix this shit. and I think if you are invested in the project of education for its own sake, you have to consider the ways in which incentivizing your students not to rely on chatgpt involves changing the structure of your shared activities together such that failing to learn and digest material is routinely boring or unpleasant and that knowing it is the only way to feel that one is succeeding in class in small, low-stakes, frequent interactions rather than single high-stakes ones.
i think one of the main issues professors and adjuncts are running into is that they not only don't have the bandwidth to redesign curriculums to account for the existence of ChatGPT, they don't have the bandwidth to do all that on top of also serving as remedial educators for students who graduated high school without most of the critical thinking skills the profs could previously expect from incoming first-year university students. you can redesign a literature course to prioritize certain kinds of engagement with the material over others, but from the various anecdotes and articles I've read, a huge part of the reason university instructors are hitting walls is that test prep-driven curriculum design in elementary and secondary school prioritized analysis of short excerpts rather than reading for depth across a whole volume. if your students literally don't know how to Read An Adult Chapter Book it is not your fault as a university professor that you don't know how to quickly jump back in time to 2020 and teach your class such a foundational skill in what was supposed to be a university-level course.
i don't blame the kids for making the rational decision to cheat when presented with obvious incentive, little (immediately obvious) downside, and inadequate resources for alternatives. i just don't know how higher ed instructors can realistically cope when they realize they're suddenly needing to essentially teach a different grade level than the one they were hired for, while still being expected to reach the original finish line.
to truly unfuck the education system you'd have to be willing to prevent kids from moving on before they mastered a grade-standard skill, and if you did that, you'd furthermore have to support them to success instead of just punishing failure. you'd have to make it so taking longer to understand something did not have obvious i immediate real-world consequences as immediate as the real-world consequence of moving on without understanding. and that's a lot to ask.
