ChatGPT has aided a judge in a ruling in Colombia, passed a Wharton MBA exam, and become the fastest-growing application to reach one million users, surpassing a record previously held by Instagram, since its public release in November 2022.
With ChatGPT making waves in academia, universities and schools around the world have been quick to respond. Although Columbia has not released an official statement regarding the use of ChatGPT in the classroom, conversations about future policy are ongoing, a University spokesperson confirmed in a statement to Spectator.
The software generates writing based on human-inputted prompts and follow-up questions and is trained from an extensive database of online material, which students told Spectator they have used to assist in school work ranging from Intro to Java problem sets to a University Writing paper. But it has its limitations—the natural language processing software can only rely on information available on the internet before September 2021.
In January, New York City public schools banned students from using the software. The same month, Sciences Po, a French university with whom General Studies has a dual-degree program, prohibited the use of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools without supervision or appropriate referencing, with the threat of expulsion from the university or “French higher education as a whole” in the case of violation.
Harvard College’s Dean Rakesh Khurana, Yale University’s Provost Scott Strobel and Associate Provost for Academic Initiatives Jennifer Frederick have all issued public statements on the use of AI in classrooms. Administrators at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Vermont are in the process of drafting amendments to their policies to include guidelines on AI usage.
Although administrators at Columbia have yet to release a public statement about ChatGPT, Barnard’s Center for Engaged Pedagogy released a statement on generative AI with guidance about how to critically talk about the software with students and ways to move forward. Columbia’s Center for Teaching and Learning released its own guidelines on what ChatGPT is and potential resources for students and faculty, in addition to another statement on promoting academic integrity.
Columbia’s Center for Student Success and Intervention defines cheating as “wrongfully using or attempting to use unauthorized materials, information, study aids, or the ideas or work of another in order to gain an unfair advantage.” Cheating is “prohibited” and, according to the University’s academic integrity policies, students caught cheating face the risk of expulsion.
According to OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, the bot “is not infallible,” and states that if it’s used in classrooms, it should be under instructor supervision.
In order to inform educators on how ChatGPT can be used, the CTL hosted a Teaching and ChatGPT Forum on Feb. 13. Separately, Columbia will broaden the conversation to its students through its academic integrity week programming, which begins Monday.
Deputy News Editor Sarah Huddleston can be contacted at sarah.huddleston@columbiaspectator.com. Follow Spectator on Twitter @ColumbiaSpec..
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