“Back in our day, we had to write our own college essays,” is a gripe you might now hear from someone as relatively young as Gen X, thanks to ChatGPT.
Turns out, the AI software is SO good at writing essays for students looking to cut corners, that a University of Reading study found 94% of AI-written coursework went undetected by flesh-and-blood evaluators.
The study, published in the journal PLOS-One, was described as a Turing Test for just how good “CheatGPT” is becoming at passing itself off as a student’s own thoughts and words — and all those 1s and 0s passed with flying colors: The completely AI-driven software generated papers that were “indistinguishable” from those that were submitted by humans in the study.
But not only did they pass as the work of human authors — the ChatGPT essays got better grades than those submitted by actual students 83.4% of the time.
The researchers are calling the results a “wake-up call.”
“Other than asking students not to use it via standard academic policy, there is nothing to stop students from using AI in completing their coursework,” the scientists noted.
The study’s findings pose, “serious questions for the educational sector if we are to maintain the academic integrity of our assessments,” they concluded.