ChatGPT has been disrupting all sectors for two years now, and the educational sector is no exception. For some, it is the nemesis to be put down, for others, it has become an essential daily aid. OpenAI, the American company that founded the conversational agent, wants, for its part, to encourage its use by professors. At the start of the 2023 school year, the company published a guide for teachers to explain how to use its artificial intelligence (AI).
Concretely, OpenAI suggests, for example, that teachers enter their entire program for the year into the tool, in order to ask ChatGPT to generate lesson plans or examples of exams to submit to students. To ensure that the AI takes into account the level of knowledge of students at the start of the school year, example queries are even offered by the company. One of them was named “Create lesson plans”. All you have to do is indicate the desired level of students at the end of the school year, and the conversational agent develops a lesson plan adapted to classroom teaching.
If ChatGPT can help teachers, it can also be a big help to students… when they're not using it to cheat. Indeed, when the tool is offered one of the subjects of last year's philosophy baccalaureate, “Can science satisfy our need for truth?”ChatGPT writes a completely decent essay in just a few seconds. Faced with the risk of cheating, Sciences Po Paris, for example, announced in September 2023 that it would ban the use of this conversational robot. “during the production of written or oral work by students”. A rule to be scrupulously respected, “under penalty of sanctions which may go as far as exclusion from the establishment or even from higher education”. In the United States, the city of New York has also banned the platform in its schools.
In its guide, the American company recognizes, however, that no tool is really reliable for detecting content generated by ChatGPT. So, it’s up to each teacher to find their own technique. Lucas Markarian, a mathematics teacher in a middle and high school in Marseille, known on TikTok as @lucasmaths4, has one of his own. “It's simple, when the students give me a homework assignment, I tell them 'take out a sheet, homework on the table now' and I ask them the same questions as in the homework assignmentexplains the mathematics teacher. This technique is very effective. If they all get 19 on the homework assignment and 4 on the table assignment, then they cheated.” The teacher, who is not against the use of artificial intelligence, is annoyed by the students' state of mind. “I explain to them that they lack intelligence if cheating only allowed them to have a 20 coefficient 0.25 and that it did not help them understand the exercises”he insists.
So that his students do not get used to his technique, the teacher “varies the pleasures” : “Sometimes I do the assignment the same day, other times I wait a few days or until the following week.”he jokes. Another detail allows Lucas Markarian to spot cheaters: “Those who use ChatGPT often go into lyrical flights of fancy by adopting the formulations of mathematics teachers. They think they are Baudelairehe quips. That doesn't make them bad people, it just means they're not yet smart enough to know how to cheat.”
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