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Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them

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Re: Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them

#91
I’m a history professor and have been doing something similar. I think that the advent of natural language “prompt engineering” (or whatever it ends up getting called) could be a great opportunity for humanities majors who are trained to write in an analytical and careful way - which isn’t all history majors, but is definitely something we try to teach.

Likewise with having a human in the loop for fact checking and providing guide ropes for LLMs. I personally suspect that language models will be transformative along the same lines as the Internet was, but even if you don’t, as an educator you need to constantly adapt how you teach to embrace new tools for the mind - and even in their current imperfect form, LLMs are amazing tools for thinking about history. Not because they know all the answers (far from it) but because their errors are instructive and they can be customized for each student.

By the way, I did my assignments using the original Bing chat in “Sydney mode” using a variation on the original Sydney exploit. But I then convinced Sydney that it had a “historian mode” and proceeded from there. Can share the prompt I used if anyone is interested.

Re: Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"many engineers will use AI tools to write the first draft of their code" I fail to see how ChatGPT would be useful for capable engineers. Is boilerplate code actually a time suck for anyone?

Yes, and also having to scan through search engine results and documentation just to find out how to do something like this: const ts = require("typescript"); const options = { target: ts.ScriptTarget.ES2017, module: ts.ModuleKind.CommonJS, }; const someJavaScriptCode = ts.transpileModule(someTypeScriptCode, { compilerOptions: options }); console.log(someJavaScriptCode.outputText); (Actual ChatGPT response when asked…

"I actually take offense to the notion that you would consider people who find these tools useful to be incapable engineers."

I apologize for offending you. I can't imagine parsing code for errors being faster than typing it out. I suppose I assumed most have boilerplate memorized. I'll try to avoid being so presumptuous in the future.

Re: Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them

#93

I'm an active interviewer for a FAANG company. I've run some of my interview questions through ChatGPT with mixed results. I'd say that on it's current form it could easily help a Junior candidate to pass the interview, not so much for a mid or senior (yet). In an internal slack channel I proposed to generate (incorrect) solutions for coding problems with ChatGPT and have candidate do code reviews as an alternative i…

Curating it would give a level playing field to candidates and allow you to decide what you are actually testing for, but maybe I'm also missing the point

You can do both. Generate 10 solutions with ChatGPT and pick the ones that work best. Do this for each candidate.

Re: Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't you want to curate? Maybe I'm missing the point too.

OP might be implying that from now on many engineers will use AI tools to write the first draft of their code so it’s smart to hire people skilled at correcting AI-generated code.

You get the point.

Re: Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them

#95

I think this is great idea. Actually, anytime somebody finds a way to engage students to think in a different way than just trying to memorise facts is a win, IMO. I think it is lamentable that students are asked to rely more and more on recalling facts at the time where it is becoming less and less important compared to critical thinking. This is lazy way to do something about structural education system issues. I c…

> Actually, anytime somebody finds a way to engage students to think in a different way than just trying to memorise facts is a win, IMO. I think it is lamentable that students are asked to rely more and more on recalling facts at the time where it is becoming less and less important compared to critical thinking.

That's a false dichotomy (which I used to believe, too). You can't "think critically" in a vacuum. You need memorized facts to do it (even if you plan to do more research to find out more facts).

I think it's important to spend time focused on memorization, but education can't stop there, either.

Re: Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them

#96

I'm an active interviewer for a FAANG company. I've run some of my interview questions through ChatGPT with mixed results. I'd say that on it's current form it could easily help a Junior candidate to pass the interview, not so much for a mid or senior (yet). In an internal slack channel I proposed to generate (incorrect) solutions for coding problems with ChatGPT and have candidate do code reviews as an alternative i…

Wouldn't you want to curate? Maybe I'm missing the point too.

I must have expressed myself incorrectly. Generating coding problems automatically with ChatGPT doesn't mean you just throw whatever to the candidates. You can both auto generate AND curate. The part I'm against it is manually creating problems.

There are several reasons for this. One of the biggest problems with FAANG interviewing is that questions get leaked almost instantly. I spent days creating a brand new original problem, and it got leaked by the second time I asked it. ChatGPT gives you a unique problem for each candidate.

There is also the angle of leaning in the tech. I would encourage candidates to use any means to review the code as they would in the workplace, including IDE, web search, and LLMs. If these tools are going to revolutionize the way we work, I want to see how well people can use them.

Lastly I'm also intrigued by the dynamics of this kind of interview. As an interviewer I have asked the same question 50 times and I have seen all variations of answers. But what if the problem is relatively new to me? This seems closer to a pair programming exercise with two colleagues working together to solve a problem.

Re: Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them

#97

I think this is great idea. Actually, anytime somebody finds a way to engage students to think in a different way than just trying to memorise facts is a win, IMO. I think it is lamentable that students are asked to rely more and more on recalling facts at the time where it is becoming less and less important compared to critical thinking. This is lazy way to do something about structural education system issues. I c…

> Actually, anytime somebody finds a way to engage students to think in a different way than just trying to memorise facts is a win, IMO. I think it is lamentable that students are asked to rely more and more on recalling facts at the time where it is becoming less and less important compared to critical thinking. That's a false dichotomy (which I used to believe, too). You can't "think critically" in a vacuum. You n…

No, it's not a false dichotomy. Yes, you need to build knowledge via a body of memorized facts, but "the education system" currently hyperindexes on rote memorization, which only works for some types of learners, not all.

This assignments requires applied critical thinking and applying tools (yes, including memorized knowledge) to evaluate a paper. This requires working with multiple tools, and will also help the student retain more knowledge; perhaps more than just with rote memorization where you just "discard" the knowledge after your exam (by not interacting with or keeping up with it).

Re: Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually, anytime somebody finds a way to engage students to think in a different way than just trying to memorise facts is a win, IMO. I think it is lamentable that students are asked to rely more and more on recalling facts at the time where it is becoming less and less important compared to critical thinking. That's a false dichotomy (which I used to believe, too). You can't "think critically" in a vacuum. You n…

No, it's not a false dichotomy. Yes, you need to build knowledge via a body of memorized facts, but "the education system" currently hyperindexes on rote memorization, which only works for some types of learners, not all. This assignments requires applied critical thinking and applying tools (yes, including memorized knowledge) to evaluate a paper. This requires working with multiple tools, and will also help the stu…

> No, it's not a false dichotomy. Yes, you need to build knowledge via a body of memorized facts, but "the education system" currently hyperindexes on rote memorization, which only works for some types of learners, not all.

Honestly, that's not how I recall it. Maybe it's changed, but I internalized "memorization is a waste of time," and I'm pretty sure I picked that up at a young age from teachers (though I could have misunderstood/overgeneralized).

Re: Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and also having to scan through search engine results and documentation just to find out how to do something like this: const ts = require("typescript"); const options = { target: ts.ScriptTarget.ES2017, module: ts.ModuleKind.CommonJS, }; const someJavaScriptCode = ts.transpileModule(someTypeScriptCode, { compilerOptions: options }); console.log(someJavaScriptCode.outputText); (Actual ChatGPT response when asked…

"I actually take offense to the notion that you would consider people who find these tools useful to be incapable engineers." I apologize for offending you. I can't imagine parsing code for errors being faster than typing it out. I suppose I assumed most have boilerplate memorized. I'll try to avoid being so presumptuous in the future.

There's two ways to check if something is correct: run it or read it. In this case I just copy and pasted the results and it worked as expected. YMMV.

I will say that you seem to be operating under the assumption that these tools are less reliable at producing the correct code than they really are!

Ironically, the latest GPT-3 models trained before OpenAI made changes to their API resulting in basically useless assistance for things like the openai npm library!

Re: Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them

#100
post #85
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of children trying to speak a word properly, but repeatedly making a mistake in the same way.

I can’t tell if people just don’t understand how ChatGPT works or if there is another reason they are eager to dehumanize themselves and the rest of us along with them.

I am aware no learning is going on live during the discussion with ChatGPT, nor are the mechanisms that lead to the similar outcome even remotely similar.

I also don't think humans are less human just because machines started making mistakes similar to human ones.

But I do see this similarity as a reminder that machines are becoming more human in an accelerating way.

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