Are Wisconsin colleges worried about students using AI to cheat? Not really.

Kelly Meyerhofer
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Paul Stoy shows student an example of ChatGPT, new Al-powered technology, Friday in his class. Stoy asked the program to write a code to model data that is not linear. The program came close, Stoy said. "You would need to change a few things to get a perfect score," he said.

University of Wisconsin-Madison students in Professor Paul Stoy's class late last month stared up at the screen, mesmerized as a new technology called ChatGPT wrote a computer code to calculate planetary temperature. The task would normally take students several minutes while the chatbot completed it in seconds.

But then a student spotted something off. The artificial intelligence-powered chatbot had wrongly put one of the variables in the numerator of the equation, not the denominator.

"Moral: AI is an unbelievable tool but students are smarter," Stoy wrote on social media after the class concluded.

Stoy's perspective reflects how a lot of Wisconsin college instructors are thinking about ChatGPT, a tool released by nonprofit OpenAI last fall that can solve science and math problems, write papers and craft code on command. Some are incorporating ChatGPT into their classrooms, believing they have a duty to share both the benefits and pitfalls of a technology that will become an increasingly larger part of everyday life.

Nationally, the tool has alarmed some educators about plagiarism and cheating. K-12 school districts in New York, Los Angeles and Baltimore have banned the tool from their WiFi networks.

But at the college level, Stoy and others are taking a more measured approach. They feel that avoiding the technology altogether won't deter students from using it and that the overwhelming majority of students aren't looking to fake their way through a college degree.

UW-Madison doesn't plan to write a new policy about ChatGPT, said John Zumbrunnen, the university's vice provost of teaching and learning. The academic integrity policy already applies. The advice he's offering instructors: "Take this new technology seriously, but don’t panic."

UW-Madison senior Christina Gutrich attends a class taught by Professor Paul Stoy on Friday.

UW-Madison education professor David Williamson Shaffer remembers similar historical panics when the calculator and internet hit classrooms and how unfounded the worries turned out to be. He studies how new technology affects education.

"The problem isn’t that we should stop people from using AI," he said. "If AI can pass our tests, why can’t we ask more interesting questions on the test? We should be worried about it not because of cheating but because it shows we’re not teaching the right things."

Instructors teach students how to responsibly use ChatGPT

Instructors' approaches to teaching are already changing in response to ChatGPT. Stoy, for example, said he's shifting from a focus on exam questions to project-based learning.

At UW Law School, Bonnie Shucha and Kris Turner co-teach Advanced Legal Research, and they brought up ChatGPT on Day 1 of classes to show how it approaches legal questions.

"Skepticism ruled the day for the students," Turner said of the demonstration.

Students in the class were concerned about the sources ChatGPT was drawing from and the lack of citations it provided, he said. Turner encouraged them to approach ChatGPT like they would Wikipedia — with a grain of salt.

Some students unaware of ChatGPT, others embrace the technology

Of a dozen UW-Milwaukee students interviewed, most said they didn't know about the technology and only two said an instructor had brought up ChatGPT in class.

UWM senior Andrew Berwanger said a classmate told him they had used ChatGPT to write a resume. Berwanger suspects many more are using it, and professors need to provide ground rules.

Transparency is key, said UW-Madison psychology professor Morton Ann Gernsbacher. Students using ChatGPT on an assignment must inform her when and how they used it. She shares the tool with students in class because she wants to ensure an even playing field.

UW-Madison philosophy professor Lawrence Shapiro thinks the number of students cheating with ChatGPT is small, and those individuals are only hurting themselves.

ChatGPT might actually help students improve their writing, Shapiro said. Students might object to having the entire class pick apart their paper, but the "chatbots couldn’t possibly care," he wrote in an opinion story for The Washington Post.

"As long as a student is still learning something, why not use it as a tool, like spell check?" asked Lukas Krajewski, a second-year information technology student at UWM. "Use it alongside learning instead of replacing it."

Even at the highest level of university administrations, some are beginning to embrace ChatGPT.

UW-Madison Provost John Karl Scholz asked ChatGPT to write a sonnet about how the tool can enhance teaching and learning on college campuses. The poem was pretty good, as he showed the UW Board of Regents during a presentation on last week.

The stanza he highlighted: "Material generated with such ease, less time spent on tasks, more time to teach and please."

Contact Kelly Meyerhofer at kmeyerhofer@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @KellyMeyerhofer.