Ready or Not, AI is in Your Classroom
Faculty are experimenting with ways to include artificial intelligence in their curriculum and allowing students to use AI platforms in their work.
For Health Sciences faculty, artificial intelligence in the classroom has expanded beyond the use of plagiarism checkers to ChatGPT helping to write papers or even creating sample exam questions.
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Artificial intelligence does have, and has had for a long time, a place in the classroom. Consider the use of applications like TurnItIn, which professors have used to detect plagiarism in coursework for a number of years.
While TurnItIn has been widely used, a recent study by the University of Arizona’s Hui Wang found that out of the top 100 universities in the U.S., more than a third had unclear policies on the use of artificial intelligence.
The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI has actually developed a way to detect plagiarism but hasn’t released it yet despite concerns that some students might use AI to cheat. The University Center for Assessment, Teaching & Technology is currently piloting ChatGPT as an integration platform for classroom activities.
Those applications can make reviewing essays and papers easier by eliminating the need for each classroom leader to check for copied work. But beyond that, Health Sciences educators are putting AI to good use for today’s students.
AI giving an assist on exams
At the University of Arizona R. Ken Coit College of Pharmacy, Christopher Edwards, PharmD, said he and Brian Erstad, PharmD, recently completed a study to see if AI can write useable exam questions for a hypothetical course.
“We gave ChatGPT a limited amount of information and ask it to produce 10 multiple-choice questions around a given topic,” he said. But there’s a catch.
“How usable are those questions right out of the box?” Edwards asked. “Do they accurately reflect the material? Is it asking you something that matters? Is it relevant? Is it the appropriate level for the class that you are assigning it to?
“We found about half of the questions were decent. They could be used right away with some minor revisions by the instructor so that those questions could probably be used on an exam or quiz.”
The potential time-saving quality of AI-generated questions makes it useful, he added, much like when spell-check first became readily available.
“When spell-check came out, there was a lot of discussion around how people aren’t going to learn how to spell because they’re just going to rely on this tool in order to help point them in the right direction,” he said. “And that’s not necessarily true, right? I think people have learned to incorporate spell-checking into their daily workflows and learned to ignore the spell-checker when it’s giving them bad information.
“We have to figure out where AI ethically fits into the current landscape. I don’t think the correct answer is, ‘Oh, this thing exists, but we should just ignore it and pretend that it isn’t there.’ It does have a lot of potential, particularly for procedurally generated writing.”
This article originally appeared on the University of Arizona Health Sciences website.