When students take health classes during the new school year at D’Youville University, some of their professors will instruct them to use ChatGPT and other chatbots to simulate interactions with patients who have a variety of medical symptoms.

Their professors then will grade them on how well they followed the proper treatment protocols.

Student use of artificial intelligence won’t stop there, either.

“We want them to use AI at many levels, because we know that this is going to be a skill that their workforce will reward,” said Humberto Hernandez, D’Youville director for online learning and instructional design.

ChatGPT became the fastest growing application in history this year, and chatbots became one of the most controversial topics in education.

Western New York colleges and universities are among those from across the globe changing their academic policies in hopes of preventing students from using AI to cheat. Chatbots are also raising the curiosity of faculty and administrators looking to advance learning in their classrooms with help from the new technology.

Cracking down on chatbots

Chatbots are computer programs that use artificial intelligence and natural language processing tools that can answer questions and help people complete tasks, including academic assignments, with human-like vocal and text responses.

Hernandez, also an economics professor at D’Youville, noticed during the start of spring semester earlier this year that students would typically submit one to three paragraphs with some depth for his discussion board assignments.

By week four, some of those students were submitting five to six paragraphs of perfectly worded text that was far more thorough.

“I was like ‘Whoa! Either all of these students are acing my class and they’re doing fantastic and I have to be teaching this extremely well,’” he said. “’Or, they are really using a lot of ChatGPT.’ “

He started to wonder if D’Youville’s academic integrity policy addressed AI – and learned that it did not. He was concerned about how it would impact students, teachers and class work across campus.

D’Youville soon advised those with ties to the university not to put any personal or identifying information into chatbots, but no academic policy is yet set in stone.

“It’s really hard for us to put students through the standardized operating procedure that we have in place for academic integrity when there is not even a way for us to detect it,” Hernandez said.

AI standards differ

It can be difficult to prove that a student used chatbots to cheat on an assignment. A Washington Post columnist found that a popular detection tool, in place at more than 10,000 secondary and higher education institutions, can falsely accuse students of using AI-generated text for their assignments.

Several administrators and professors in the region told The Buffalo News that they are skeptical about using AI-detecting software tools.

Daniel Higgins, director of journalism programs and an assistant professor at Canisius University, said he has no idea about how to detect AI-generated text when grading student submissions. He knows detection tools can lack reliability, so he doesn’t use them, and discourages colleagues from doing so, too.

“I don’t even know if I will try to figure out if students cheated using AI,” Higgins said. “I don’t want to spend a lot of time being a detective. I want to teach, and that’s not teaching.”

At the University of Buffalo, Kelly Ahuna leads such detective work.

Ahuna, director of the UB Office of Academic Integrity, and her team have cracked down on misuse of chatbots for cheating on assignments.

She finds that faculty members are generally good at detecting AI-generated text in assignments for three reasons:

AI chatbots might generate a response that is not related to the specific information teachers gave students in class.

Like humans, chatbots also make mistakes, commonly referred to as “hallucinations,” and will write things that are inaccurate and odd.

AI-generated text is formulaic.

Cheating with chatbots is not usually charged as plagiarism at UB because plagiarism is when someone uses another person’s language or ideas without crediting them, Ahuna said. Rather, students are typically charged with falsifying academic materials or cheating.

In hopes of lessening cheating, Ahuna thinks it is important that faculty clearly tell students the learning objectives of their class and explain why students can or cannot use chatbots.

“The student as a novice doesn’t always know (the learning objectives),” she said. “I think students will be more likely to respect the rules if they see the logic of how it adds up to their learning.”

‘We have to embrace this’

The D’Youville AI Learning community, a faculty group that meets monthly to discuss AI topics, is working on a university AI academic policy they hope will be finished by January.

In its absence, the learning community has been strategizing how the university can ensure faculty best use AI to complement student learning while keeping curriculum rigorous for the upcoming fall semester.

“We have to embrace this,” Hernandez said.

To make that happen, the faculty group suggests assignments using AI should be based on reflection about what a chatbot produced, so students can still analyze and critically talk about the related subject. They also encourage the usage of AI as a role-playing tool to simulate real-life scenarios for assignments.

Higgins started using ChatGPT in October, and introduced it to his students before a couple of them even heard about it.

“Come to the last day of class,” he told his his media ethics students, “and I will make it worth your while.”

Students were greeted with an essay five to six pages long that ChatGPT generated and they were tasked with grading.

Higgins had a discussion with students about what they thought would happen if ChatGPT did the assignment. Then, Higgins pressed a button and ChatGPT went to work.

His students gave an average grade of C-plus on what ChatGPT generated.

“This being a university, we are here to teach students how to use tools,” Higgins said. “Now, I have to see how to use these (chatbots) without compromising my values of honesty, integrity and transparency, and then pass those values on to my students.”

Ahuna said chatbots can be good for cognitive offloading – reducing the demands it takes to complete a task – like a calculator. By allowing students to complete lower-level tasks that they already know more efficiently, it can provide more time for higher-level thinking.

If students don’t have the skills to do low-level tasks and offload that work to AI chatbots, however, it threatens learning, she said.

Students split on AI use

Freshmen starting classes soon will be the first to have easy access to AI throughout their college careers.

Many already have dabbled.

“It helped me pass high school,” said Roberto Jimenez, an incoming UB freshman. “It was basically my personal writer.”

In high school, Jimenez used ChatGPT for a last-minute essay in his economics class that he did not want to take the time to type out completely, he said.

Instead he typed the essay question into ChatGPT with what he had written so far. The program completed the rest of the essay and he edited the AI-generated text to sound like him before submitting the essay to his teachers.

When Jimenez gets writer’s block, he often turns to ChatGPT for suggestions and ideas. He knows it can hallucinate, so he takes precautions and fact-checks.

His friends are critical of chatbots, and they think using them for assignments is morally wrong, Jimenez said. He said he has used it for good reasons, unlike some of his peers, who use it to write essays and turn them in without any editing or revising.

Jimenez said he deleted ChatGPT and does not plan to use it at UB to adhere to academic integrity – but added he’s eager to see what chatbots can do in the future.

“Just imagine if AI now is like this,” he said. “Potentially it can write a whole novel, architecture structures. The possibilities are endless.”

Trey Lohnas, a first-year master’s student in education studies at UB, agreed. He remembers when ChatGPT became well-known at UB. Half his professors told students they couldn’t use it. The other half told students they would get little out of class subjects if they did.

“I’ve decided to kind of stay away from it,” he said. “I’m paying for my education, and I want to get the most out of it.”