Completing homework can be stressful, and with the school year coming to a close, cheating can seem like an easy way to make it to summer. 

While programs like Photomath and Google have been accessible to students for years, ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot, gives students an entirely different way to complete their schoolwork. 

ChatGPT was created by OpenAI and launched its feedback-collection phase on Nov. 30, 2022. It’s free to use, but ChatGPT Plus is also available for $20 per month and gives users added benefits such as access to the AI during peak user times. 

To use ChatGPT, one simply has to create an account and type in a request, and it can be anything from generating lists, answering questions, writing essays or giving feedback on what you already have written. 

To test out its capabilities, The Mercury asked ChatGPT to generate an exciting title for an article on ChatGPT and education. With only those instructions, I was given the title for this article: “Revolutionizing Education with ChatGPT: How AI-Powered Chatbots are Changing the Game for Students and Educators Alike.”

So why does this matter? Students have already had access to Google and other tools to assist them in their learning or coursework completion, so how is this any different?

The difference is that instead of giving students access to work uploaded by others, ChatGPT combines information from various sources and rewrites it, giving ChatGPT the flexibility to answer a prompt in seconds. 

This makes ChatGPT and similar AI the perfect tool for students who want to finish an assignment quickly, and it is estimated that half of college students have already used ChatGPT to cheat on assignments and tests.

“We’re already at the point where AI can write entire projects, and then a different AI tool can reword it to make AI undetectable,” Rehan Haque, who worked at Metatalent.ai, said. 

Not only can it assist with homework, but it can pass exams too. When given full Advanced Placement tests, GPT-4, ChatGPT’s predecessor, scored a 5 on AP Art History, AP Biology, AP Environmental Science, AP Macroeconomics, AP Psychology, AP Statistics, AP Government and Politics and AP US History exams.

That being said, “AI cannot write an LEQ or DBQ for APUSH according to the College Board Requirements” without a lot of “telling ChatAI what to do,” BFA’s AP US History teacher Justin Bedell said. 

In his classroom, Bedell uses AI such as Chat AI as a teaching tool. He has the AI “write responses to some College Board prompts (short answer questions) and then [his class] tears them apart and assesses them according to the College Board rubrics. [They] then revise ChatAI’s responses (on a different Google Doc) to meet the different criteria of the College Board’s rubrics.”

While Bedell pointed out that students turning in AI-generated essays meets the BFA guidelines for Academic Dishonesty, “if a student is using AI as a learning tool or support early within their learning process, preferably with me and my support, but completing the learning assessments on their own… then I do not consider it cheating,” Bedell said. 

“It may help to think of ChatGPT like a calculator,” Ashley Abramson, writer for the American Psychological Association, said. “If you were teaching simple addition, then a calculator might hinder learning. But in a calculus course, the same tool could free up cognitive resources to help students perform more advanced skills they need to learn.”

ChatGPT’s ability to give instant feedback and quickly generate information can also be used as a teaching aid for students who can’t afford a tutor, bridging an educational gap.

Adam Norwood, Coordinator of the Barnes Initiative for Collaborative Learning and Program Faculty at the Upper Valley Educators Institute and author of The Story of Teacher Skill Development: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, admitted that these new developments can be alarming for educators.

“It’s honestly scary as a teacher. You start questioning your ability to design meaningful and challenging work that can’t be quickly undone,” Norwood said. 

But this is not a new fear, he explained. With the development of the internet and Google, teachers have to expand beyond an information delivery system to students. 

“Now that we have ChatGPT, the bar just got raised,” Norwood said. 

Instead of fearing these new developments, Norwood encourages educators to teach their students how to use AI appropriately.

“‘I’ve told my students, ‘listen, ChatGPT is there, you can use it. If you’re able to use it to solve the problems I’m giving you to work on, then I need to do a better job coming up with problems for you,’” Norwood said. 

So while AI software such as ChatGPT can be used as cheating, teachers are coming up with new and creative ways to incorporate it into student learning.