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How to Use ChatGPT to Fail a Final Exam in Three Easy Steps
A cautionary but reassuring tale of a student, a teacher, and the limitations of technology.
Names, places, and other identifying information has been redacted from the following story to protect the guilty and the busy. That being said, everything I do relate here is absolutely true from a primary source.
“I failed my first student for using ChatGPT today,” my friend told me as we sat at dinner. They teach at the higher education level, and it’s exam season.
“Oh?” The societal ramifications of ChatGPT is one of my own interests, and we’d talked before about how it would influence their work.”What gave it away?”
With their permission, let me tell you the the three things that made it really obvious the student was simply cutting and pasting answers generated by an AI.
1. It was too fast.
This was an exam students had to take online, using proprietary software from the school. That meant that there was a lot of data available for the teacher — including how long it took each student to complete the exam.
For most students, it took over one hundred minutes.
This particular student — someone whose work had not stood out in any way during the semester — completed their exam in sixty-three minutes.
Red flag number one.
2. Video killed the ChatGPT star.
For portions of the test, students had to watch a video and talk about what they saw there.
ChatGPT is not (yet) able to watch videos. However, because my friend is a conscientious teacher, all the videos included transcripts.
The student took the logical step of feeding the transcript of the video into the AI before asking the exam questions. Unfortunately, in the process of cutting and pasting, they neglected to notice where the AI had written “…according to the transcript…” in the midst of the answers.
Perhaps it was slightly possible that a student might use a transcript instead of watching a video — for example, if they were blind. But this particular…
