American Schools Were Deeply Unprepared for ChatGPT, Public Records Show (404media.co) 77
School districts across the United States were woefully unprepared for ChatGPT's impact on education, according to thousands of pages of public records obtained by 404 Media. Documents from early 2023, the publication reports, show a "total crapshoot" in responses, with some state education departments admitting they hadn't considered ChatGPT's implications while others hired pro-AI consultants to train educators.
In California, when principals sought guidance, state officials responded that "unfortunately, the topic of ChatGPT has not come up in our circles." One California official admitted, "I have never heard of ChatGPT prior to your email." Meanwhile, Louisiana's education department circulated presentations suggesting AI "is like giving a computer a brain" and warning that "going back to writing essays - only in class - can hurt struggling learners."
Some administrators accepted the technology enthusiastically, with one Idaho curriculum head calling ChatGPT "AMAZING" and comparing resistance to early reactions against spell-check.
In California, when principals sought guidance, state officials responded that "unfortunately, the topic of ChatGPT has not come up in our circles." One California official admitted, "I have never heard of ChatGPT prior to your email." Meanwhile, Louisiana's education department circulated presentations suggesting AI "is like giving a computer a brain" and warning that "going back to writing essays - only in class - can hurt struggling learners."
Some administrators accepted the technology enthusiastically, with one Idaho curriculum head calling ChatGPT "AMAZING" and comparing resistance to early reactions against spell-check.
Anti-Drone Drones (Score:2, Interesting)
They should've asked Siri (Score:4, Funny)
School administrator: "Hey Siri, what's this ChatGPT thing and what do we need to do to prepare for it?"
Siri: "I dunno, ask Alexa."
Were? (Score:5, Informative)
As a teacher in a large, public high school, I can confirm that at least one school is still unprepared for ChatGPT. Pretty sure we're not the only one.
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Re: Were? (Score:5, Interesting)
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MOD PARENT UP! (Score:2)
"... move towards actually educating our kids."
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If your ChatGPT is only speaking toddler-grade stoned nonsense, I would look to the input side first, because many people are using it to make polished and presentable results.
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I think for most students, eventually they'll be found out and realize using AI to do their work will not help them long term.
If I were a teacher - I'd simply make the final exam worth enough points to drop the grade by at least a full letter if failed and force that exam to be pencil/paper only. You'll quickly figure out who was faking it the entire time. Not perfect but the paper/pencil method has worked for centuries.
Still People Unaware (Score:5, Informative)
While techies might find this unimaginable, there are still plenty of people in society who have never interacted with the current wave of AI tools and don't really understand them. I had a conversation just a couple of weeks ago with an educated professional who didn't know what Chat GPT was. I don't think we needed "public records" to know that there are a lot of teachers and administrators who haven't yet mastered (and written policies for) a technology that only really hit mass availability 3 years ago.
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That's pretty disturbing we have teachers and school officials in charge of education that have never heard of ChatGPT. Have they been living under a rock? You'd have to not watch (or read) the news, late night shows, or South Park not to have heard of ChatGPT.
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They've probably heard the name and vaguely know it has something to do with computers, but that's about it.
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LLMs make you dumb... (Score:2)
Evidence for that is raising. Maybe this is not a good thing to use on school-level, except in a very limited fashion?
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Evidence for that is raising. Maybe this is not a good thing to use on school-level, except in a very limited fashion?
Is ChatGPT better than the status quo? Jury’s still out on that one given the sheer destruction of the American edumucashun system by political activists pretending to be educators.
We Left No (Moron) Child Behind. The end result of that is in the workplace now. Also known as why HR had to invent DEI.
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I think the concern is how students are using it and how they use it on their homework.
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I know. And I observe it and discuss it with academic students regularly. Smart students are not in danger. They know they have to learn and understand things themselves and ChatGPT and its like are just tools to be used when needed. But average and below-average students are a very different story. They too often rely on LLMs and that widens the gap to the smart ones.
Not suprising (Score:5, Interesting)
ChatGPT and cheating is a concern; how do they handle when kids are using AI to make fake nude photos of classmates and spread them around, or phones get hacked by their peers and data is shared around the school?
At least when it comes to school violence, parents are starting to be held accountable for their kids' actions [cbsnews.com]. The same step may need to be taken when it comes to utilizing tools like this to cheat and cyber bullying as well; the schools can't police what happens in the home, and i don't know of another way to control this without making the parents or guardians liable.
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We're in an age where social media is the norm, and schools are still grappling with the idea that cyber bullying on social media is a school phenomenon but does not actually occur on campus. From a policy perspective most schools are used to the idea of managing the physical space of the school and the community of children there, but has no idea how to handle cyber bullying despite a reported 21.6% of high schoolers face cyber bullying from their peers [stopbullying.gov], much of it happening on campus and off.
Do you really want schools to be policing your children's Internet use off campus?
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So to my original point, the only way f
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>Do you really want schools to be policing your children's Internet use off campus?
Fine, then let the police do their job and throw them in jail off campus. And before someone kills themself.
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ChatGPT and cheating is a concern; how do they handle when kids are using AI to make fake nude photos of classmates and spread them around
Yeah, we certainly can't have kids cheating at making fake nudes of their classmates; they should learn how to use Photoshop like in the old days!
Spell Check (Score:5, Insightful)
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You kind of sound like my 8th grade math teacher, who told me that "you won't always have a calculator available" to do math problems like 473x284.
He was wrong, very wrong. I had a calculator in my backpack all the way through high school and college, and then I had a smartphone with a calculator app on me at practically all times after that. Guess what, ChatGPT is now on there as well. While I can certainly write a basic e-mail on my own without help, at this point it's becoming foolish not to validate wha
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He was wrong, very wrong.
You're not dead yet. I'm sure you'll one day find yourself without a calculator. Funny story we were in an electrical substation one day trying to figure out a problem, 3 engineers standing around, not a phone or calculator between us. Problem was ... long division. Hadn't done that since primary school. We were all dumbfounded.
at this point it's becoming foolish not to validate what I'm writing with a AI peer review if it's something important
This has got to be the single most arse backwards thing I've ever heard. What you meant to write it would be foolish not to validated what AI is writing with human peer review. AI to
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Hmm. I think either you missed my point, or I did not articulate it adequately (though I will admit this is not the first time I have been accused of sounding like somebodies 8th grade math teacher so you're probably on to something). I'm not saying you shouldn't use ChatGPT for your email writing; I'm actually saying the exact opposite: that like spell check, it doesn't really matter if you use ChatGPT to write or co-write your emails.
When I said "You're not always going to have ChatGPT there for you to wa
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What does it mean to "validate what I'm writing with a AI peer review"?
Are you just using it to check your grammar? Word processors have done that for decades.
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You don't seem to realize that many (most?) people don't even know how to use a calculator properly. We are not talking about people like yourself who maybe can't do long division by hand, but people who don't even know what to do if you ask them to make change for a 20 for something that costs 18.62 and they aren't sitting at a cash register. i.e. they don't even know what subtraction really is or how to use it in a general context.
We're also pretty obviously not talking about using LLMs for "checking"
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And how many people do you know who could make that change correctly if they were using a cash register that only records transactions and doesn't do the math for you? It'
Re: Spell Check (Score:2)
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You bring perfectly valid points.
Unfortunately those points exist in a classroom. Not the real world. And kids are a LOT more aware about the more pointless parts of our American edumucashun system. Writing essays is certainly one of them.
But go ahead. Tell me the last time you were asked to “write an essay”. In the real world. That actually provided value.
’Nuff said.
(The excuse about shitty spelling is dead and lame. If you can’t spell AND can’t figure out the spellchec
Re:Spell Check (Score:4, Insightful)
Tell me the last time you were asked to “write an essay”. In the real world. That actually provided value.
"Why my department's submitted budget is justified"
"Why you, yes you, Mr. CEO, need to implement 2FA on your e-mail account"
"The benefits of moving to Azure from on-prem"
"The things that weren't the benefits we thought they were when we moved to Azure that we need to restructure"
"The performance review of Geekmux that ensures a performance bonus from this past year"
We very much still write essays in the real world...we just call them "multi-paragraph e-mails" in most cases and rarely print them on paper.
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We very much still write essays in the real world...we just call them "multi-paragraph e-mails" in most cases and rarely print them on paper.
Oh you mean that shit I learned long ago NO executive has time for? For fucks sake, that whole longer-than-the-preview-pane argument is as old as the damn preview pane.
Seriously? Multi-paragraph emails? You might as well schedule a meeting instead. So you can watch them read your ain’t-got-time-for-this-shit email essay for the first time.
(Evidence? I used to spend half my fucking day reducing my multi-paragraph emails I *thought* were full of pertinent detail, down to 140-character tweets just
Re:Spell Check (Score:5, Insightful)
> But go ahead. Tell me the last time you were asked to “write an essay”. In the real world. That actually provided value.
Several times a week. Written communication is an essential skill, even for software developers. You won't get far in your career without the ability to craft a well-structured, clear, and convincing multipage document.
Re: Spell Check (Score:1)
Pretty much every time I get an idea for a new capability for the software that my team is writing.
And then someone writes the requirements doc, so everyone understands what problem we're trying to solve. And then someone writes a design doc, so everyone understands how we're doing to do it, and has a chance to point out obstacles that are likely to come up along the way.
Or, outside work, if someone asks a question about / needs help in a field that I have some experience in, and they need to understand nua
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In HS, I had an Earth Science teacher who offered students to work at "A" level or "B" level. It manifested as extra assignments and test questions for "A" level. You had to declare which level you wanted at the beginning of each quarter.
If you went for "B" level, you were much more likely to get a "B" than you were at "A" level. However, even if you got a 100% on an assignment or test, your max grade was a "B". It met the needs of students who wanted to do the minimum, but still get a "good grade".
Also
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Unfortunately, you can come up with a full page or 20 of professionally written articles, ads, stories, email, etc., with a single line prompt these days.
The 20 page one will probably take Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar or something, esp if you want citations and references, but still.
So, in the end you may only need to input your data set, say stuff like "I want an email that says no. Make it nice." And the AI puts in all the details of that.
Huge difference (Score:2, Informative)
With spell check, you knew you were receiving the correct spelling. With ChatGPT, or other LLMs, you can, and will, be told things which aren't remotely true. For example, Google's AI said to use glue to hold cheese on your pizza [forbes.com].
Recently, that thing called Grok has been deliberately programmed to spew nonsensical bullshit about "genocide" in South African farmers REGARDLESS of the topic being discussed [axios.com].
Until things get worked o
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or any LLM
False in that regard. LLM is what it says on the box, a model. It's use is not always to write prose to you and tell you how to glue your pizza together. A whole world of LLMs exist out there to provide authoritative references to natural language queries, often simply in the form of directing you where to find the answer, and while ChatGPT produces a lot of nonsense (we actually did get it to make a recipe for us one day which worked out alright, but then I know how to cook and could validate it myself) LL
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For example, Google's AI said to use glue to hold cheese on your pizza [forbes.com].
Edible glue actually is a thing [hobbylobby.com], so the suggestion was certainly unorthodox, but not entirely based in fiction. Highly processed commercially produced foods frequently do include binding additives that could certainly be considered a sort of "glue". My personal favorite example is if you've ever tried to make a Frappuccino at home, unless you add the magic ingredient (xanthan gum), you'll just end up with a slushy mess. As ChatGPT says:
So while an AI saying “add glue to your pizza” makes for
Let's rewrite that headline. (Score:2)
American Schools Were Deeply Unprepared
There we go. That seems more appropriate. Or maybe it should be a fill in the blank, where the reader can just imagine pretty much anything about modernization and technology and the headline would still read correctly.
As to the actual subject here? Who / what was actually prepared for ChatGPT? I don't think humanity is ready for what AI is supposed to be capable of. I also don't think we're ready for how quickly industry is moving to use these not quite up to snuff
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I don't know of any org that was prepared. Even the creators of AI clearly haven't been prepared for it's acceptance and use..
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Because Everyone Likes Measurements (Score:3)
So, first off, I've yet to hear an intellectually consistent answer of 'where the line is drawn'. We were cool with spellcheck, Grammarly, parental revisions, 'cooperative learning', calculators, Cliff Notes, and Google searches...but suddenly ChatGPT is a crisis.
The real issue is that, in the most optimistic of theories, grades are supposed to be a quantification of comprehension and understanding by the student. In practice, they were seldom a true reflection of that, but the system was 'good enough' in the absence of an alternative.
The real issue is that ChatGPT has pulled the covers off the fact that we have no truly useful, truly accurate, truly consistent means of measuring understanding and aptitude. LLM's job is to pass tests, and there is no test that can be created that ChatGPT can't be trained to pass - even CAPTCHA tests are problematic because the computers are better at passing them than people at this point.
So, schools are ultimately out of runway on this issue, and are stuck working to figure out how to assess comprehension. One teacher I spoke with recently has students turn in an essay, with the written portion being 50% of the grade, and an oral exam on the written paper being the other. That is effective in English and History classes, but it's tough to scale because it's extremely time consuming, rather subjective, and one would have to be video recording every session to ensure the he-said-she-said problem is avoided. Too little time on the oral, it's difficult to give a fair grade. Too much time, and it takes a week to administer an exam, which can't be done very often.
Ultimately, education is going to have to come up with a way of measuring comprehension and understanding, at an individual level. It's taken too much time, but if we finally make a worthwhile change on this front, it's a long overdue change.
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Oral exams do have a very long history. Oxford still famously does them, and one can imagine some of the first exams ever administered were oral. However, while I agree there is no perfect way to measure understanding, it doesn't seem difficult to overcome AI by simply requiring exams to be conducted in-person and on paper without electronic devices present. If paper is too cumbersome, there is software that will create a closed exam environment. Using AI on your phone would be cheating, just as sneaking in
Too much homework (Score:4, Interesting)
Go ahead and do some googling and you will find multiple articles and studies that show homework is at best ineffective and at worst harmful. The absolute maximum amount that should be given to a College bound senior is something like 40 minutes a day and 3 hours or so on the weekends. When my kid was in high school they got about 4 to 6 hours a day on the weekdays and the same on the weekends or more.
That has nothing to do with education. That is about having too many kids and not enough jobs and not enough for them to do that's profitable for corporations so you're going to use homework to weed them out. It's the hunger games but with math problems and shitty essays.
All chat GTP is going to do is let them blow through that useless homework. They are still going to have to learn the material to pass the tests and to be blunt most of them will because again, we have multiple studies showing homework is basically useless.
but I smell a moral panic. And if it's one thing old farts like us love it's a moral panic.
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When I was in high school, they tended to use unrealistic homework burdens as a way of dissuading students from taking more rigorous classes. AP classes were more resource-intensive and it was harder to find qualified teachers for subjects like Calculus. So one way of limiting enrollment was to tell all the students that AP classes had 1-2 hours of homework a night per-class. Obviously, no student could possibly do 8 hours of homework in a night every night, but somehow plenty of students managed 4 AP class
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Evidently, school did not teach you basic sentence structure or politeness.
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That has nothing to do with education. That is about having too many kids and not enough jobs and not enough for them to do that's profitable for corporations so you're going to use homework to weed them out.
Do yourself a favour, don't simply read studies and use the conclusions to blast down some dumb conspiracy rabbit hole. Your statement makes no sense which should be obvious from the fact that homework has always existed in every country on the planet in all job market conditions.
You sound like you "did your own homework" on the topic, so take your own advice and do a little less of it. Understand that education is a slow moving beast and that it takes decades for studies on efficacy of certain education me
Slavery has always existed (Score:2)
Please for the love of God don't answer that. At least don't answer it with your honest opinion...
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As for weeding out students, no one is left behind now so that ship has sailed. You are wrong again.
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The world is way the hell more complicated and way nastier than you want to believe it is. Homework exists to weed out people that are not useful to the ruling class. That is the sole purpose of our education system now and has been for at least as long as I've been alive.
The only reason it's not extremely obvious is that the teachers try to push bac
Ah yes, the problem is the schools. (Score:1)
So, the schools were supposed to lead the target and prepare for AI essays? How? Because they're so well funded?
Did you know that horsedrawn taxis were woefully unprepared for the introduction of trolleys and cars? Silly horses!
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It's Wikipedia all over again (Score:2)
What guidance do you need as an eduactor? (Score:1)
If the kid generated an essay, does it matter? Again, assume they generated their master thesis, on cross-examination, if the examination board can't find a flaw, then who cares! On lighter wor
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since graduating in 2012, I have never written an essay, or book report, and I really don't see that I'll ever have to do that.
And what would you call this 4-paragraph, 406-word Slashdot post which intends to persuade the reader that essay writing is not a relevant life skill?
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Sounds like more grift (Score:1)
Sounds like more Teachers Union reps will be crying for more funds that will go into nothing.
What are we doing if we're not preparing kids for the future?
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Canada is far from perfect, but we spend more money per student than the US does. We pay our teachers better, we fund schools better, we support the concept of public education. Basically, we throw money at the problem. The result? Our students do better than yours.
The real grift is that so many Americans have been suckered into believing vouchers, defunding school lunch programs and other attacks on your public school system, as well as the kind of contempt for teachers you express here, will somehow tr
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Now if you can't 'program' you must still be forced to learn and have a job you suck at.
All the capable kids are neglected while the less skilled are force fed to keep up.
OMG the Noes! (Score:3)
So a totally disruptive technology comes out and runs wild in just a few years and this article is talking about how "deeply unprepared" schools were?
GTFO
*Everyone* was deeply unprepared and continues to REMAIN deeply unprepared for AI.
Singling out schools as if they were something special. It's a "Now with AI" article about failing schools.
Problem (Score:2)
This is only a problem for take home assignments and at-school assignments for which they've woven computers into the turn in process.
If they stick to paper tests on the subject with no electronics allowed, they can gauge the student's proficiency in the material. Won't solve the homework problem but personally if the student can pass a test on the material I don't really care if they cheated on homework assignments - if they know the stuff they know it and that's the goal.