To shine in his oral exam, the Zurich resident took out a paid subscription to version 4 of ChatGPT. This was necessary to be able to feed the artificial intelligence with the original texts of the books it was supposed to read, as well as with literary reviews of these works, in the form of PDF files. The student insists: if the user does not tell him that he must stick to these sources only, the robot “hallucinates”. He produces a speech that seems credible but sometimes contains gross errors.
“I prefer it to Wikipedia”
The student then created a chatbot for each of the books he should have studied. Once informed of the context, their role and their objectives, they served as partners in tackling the most important chapters of these texts. Rather proud of his move, the Zurich resident maintains that this interactive training allowed him not only to save time, but also to master the essentials of the famous Faust of Goethe, without bothering with unnecessary details.
German teacher at Romanshorn cantonal school and artificial intelligence expert at the Digital Learning Hub in Zurich, Jürg Widrig considers the method legitimate: “As long as the students do not blindly trust the robot, but remain critical and tell it exactly what he should do and what sources he should use is acceptable. I prefer it to Wikipedia.”
The taste of imposture
Quoted anonymously, another German teacher from the canton of Zurich finds it sad that matric candidates can appear competent at the time of the exam while working with robots rather than with the books themselves. He sighs, “I’ve definitely been fooled before.”
The student prepared for his other exams in the same way and obtained excellent results in all branches. He believes that this learning process is not much different from what some of his classmates do with summaries. On the other hand, he admits to having felt the unpleasant taste of imposture: “When I had my certificate in my hands, I didn’t really have the impression of success.”
