Thread by @academicswrite

I did a thing this term where I told my students they were allowed to use ChatGPT. The catch was, they had to tell me about it in a reflection when they handed in their paper. This is a thread about how it all went.

First let me say not all students took me up on the opportunity. About 48% of the class did not use ChatGPT for various reasons.

It also didn’t work the greatest for those that did. Many were disappointed with the results. Some thought it stole their voice from them. Some said it felt like cheating. Most were unhappy with what ChatGPT did.

It worked the best for things like sentence level help with wording, a final overall polish, and writing a conclusion.

Students felt it worked best when they gave it very specific information — like writing bullet points of what they already wanted to say. Or inputting completely written text and asking ChatGPT to clean it up.

Chat GTP was a good idea generator. One student used it to get ideas for what topic to do. Another student used it to try and find papers. Some used it for formatting corrections. Another used it to get ideas for describing why their content was important to nurses.

Most students used ChatGPT in ways I would judge as appropriate. Most said it was not at all helpful in writing the paper for them as it would take away the meaning of what they wanted to say. Or it took too much time.

Maybe ChatGPT will get smarter over time but for now I have written a good assignment that makes it very difficult for students to not mostly do their own work.

I did not do anything to correlate ChatGPT use with grades given so I can’t speak to that. Let’s just say I was mostly surprised and could not guess when they’d used it vs when they hadn’t.

Would I do it again? Probably. I might give a more specific list of appropriate ways to use it in the future.

For those who have asked, here is a link to a blog that describes a the paper. academicswrite.ca/2018/11/25/stu…