By Sydney Matthews | Staff Writer
The Office of Academic Integrity has begun creating a list of tools and suggestions for professors to use in order to detect ChatGPT, which is available on their website.
As the use of ChatGPT becomes more popular nationwide, services that professors use to catch plagiarism, such as Turnitin.com, do not have the capability to pick up ChatGPT.
Baylor’s academic integrity office will be adapting to fit this new-age technology.
“I have been at Baylor for 22 years; this is not the first-time new technology has come along that is challenging the way we do things in teaching, and it won’t be the last,” Dr. Wesley Null, vice provost for undergraduate education and institutional effectiveness, said.
Null said professors are encouraged to use these sites that behave like Turnitin.com and will detect AI if they feel it is necessary.
“These sites will pick up all kinds of AI, and to be honest I have yet to spoof it. I have yet to find an example of code, images or text that were created that it didn’t catch,” Dr. David Jack, computer science professor and member of the Honor Council at Baylor, said.
Just like all new technology, both Jack and Null said there are good and bad sides to ChatGPT. It all depends on how students choose to use it.
“Everything is a two-edged sword; it has good sides and bad sides. People out in the industry are using it for a variety of very beneficial things,” Jack said. “There are a lot of benefits for people with communication disabilities as well.”
Jack also said Baylor’s honor code states an act of academic honesty includes a student offering course credit for someone else’s work.
“Plagiarism, that is, incorporating into one’s work offered for course credit passages taken either word for word or in substance from a work of another, unless the student credits the original author and identifies the original author’s work with quotation marks, footnotes or another appropriate written explanation,” Baylor’s honor code states.
Null said the office is not threatened by ChatGPT. She said if the department responds appropriately, ChatGPT can actually help Baylor think deeper about general education classes and their curriculum.
“If our essay prompts are so rudimentary that AI tools can provide sufficient answers, then maybe we need better essay prompts and assignments,” Null said. “To where we are having deep conversations with students about the material that we are teaching.”
The academic integrity office is currently finding ways to use ChatGPT and other forms of AI as a learning tool. Jack said if students do not know if they can use an AI tool on an assignment, they should ask to avoid committing an honor code violation.
There will be a faculty meeting Feb. 21 that will include at least 20 minutes of conversation to discuss more about AI.
“All of the faculty are very aware of this and are thinking about ways to detect this, but more so avoid violations that can be caused by ChatGPT,” Jack said.
