After three years with ChatGPT, what’s the value of a university degree?
Tuba Shakeel has a bachelor degree with honours and has written dozens of essays, but she won’t soon forget a 600-word assignment she handed in last year. And that’s not because she received glowing feedback.
Her university’s computer software scanned the assignment before declaring with certainty: 100 per cent written by artificial intelligence, or AI. She was given zero and considered a cheat until she could prove otherwise.
“I needed to prove that this was my style of writing. I was quite lucky that at the end of my degree, so I had a lot of evidence to prove that this is the way that I write, and this is what I had previously written,” she said.
University of Sydney students Wen Zhong, Sathsara Radaliyagoda, Will Thorpe, Jack Quinlan and Tuba Shakeel.Credit: Steven Siewert
Shakeel’s ordeal typifies the upheaval universities have faced since the introduction of generative AI. The battle for institutions is to maintain a semblance of academic integrity while ensuring a tertiary education remains relevant.
This year, Shakeel began studies at the University of Sydney, among the first universities to unveil a much more permissive system for artificial intelligence use among students, enrolling in a masters of heritage conservation.
From this semester, the institution has two categories of assignment. In about 80 per cent of assignments, students can use AI freely, provided they disclose it. For the remainder, AI use is forbidden – students must sit assessments, including in-class exams and oral presentations, and must show they grasp the content themselves.
Shakeel can see no other option but to allow AI, although she is aware of downsides, especially in the attitude she has observed among some first and second year students. She said that they ask: “Why would you, if you can just, you know, use chat, GPT to do it?”
By taking that step, she said, “You’re missing out on these really useful skills.”
AI tools have made it easier to learn at university, but there are fears that it has led to a decline in actual knowledge of basic skills.Credit: N/A
Nearly three years after ChatGPT was launched, its impact was most quickly apparent on university campuses. In the US, there have been allegations that students are using it to cheat through their degrees and in the UK, some firms are hiring fewer graduates because the grunt work they previously performed can now be done with AI.
At a panel discussion about the technology last week, Sydney University’s Professor Adam Bridgeman acknowledged the potential of AI to cheapen employers’ perceptions of degrees.
“The integrity of our degrees is what gives you that passage into the world,” he said.
But he also said it was unrealistic to pretend it did not exist. “AI is completely changing the workplace, completely changing what you do, whether that’s research or if that’s in a company, we want you to have those AI skills and to be able to use AI well, ethically, responsibly and effectively.”
Second year education student Wen Zhong told the panel: “I kind of feel reluctant when using AI. I feel scared like, ‘Am I really doing my job, or am I using AI to just… replace myself?’ ”
Others say the damage is much more immediate because outsourcing to AI the tasks that form part of learning – gathering information, processing it and ultimately crafting a university assignment – may defeat the entire point of attending university: the process of learning.
“I’m quite concerned about its replacing of mental processes,” said arts student William Thorpe, citing an MIT study this year that found ChatGPT users had lower cognitive engagement and “likely decrease in learning skills”.
Acknowledging that some academics say it can be used to improve learning, Thorpe said in his student experience there was a marked discrepancy between university policy, student thinking and what academics actually enforced.
“I had this tutor last semester in a digital cultures class where there was a lot of artificial intelligence use, which actually violated university policy even back then,” he said.
“And I raised it when I saw him outside the class, and his initial response was to say that at least they’re doing the work.”
Fourth-year student Jack Quinlan, who also works as a tutor, has observed the rise of AI. When tutoring first-year students, he finds it is “really enticing to go there and not actually learn it yourself”.
The software engineering and neuroscience student says AI has personally helped him. When he sits down to study, he asks artificial intelligence to adopt a critical persona in a bid to help him study with more depth and rigour.
Ultimately, he believes that AI has been positive for students.
“I think a lot of people want to learn and actually do engage with it properly, and then use these tools. So instead of getting stuck on really small things, it pushes them to the bigger thinking they need to be doing.”
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