By Umar Fiddausi Adenike
University examiners fail to spot ChatGPT answers by students who made use of artificial intelligence
During the Covid-19 saga student had to sit for the exams at home, so they were allowed to look at notes and references, and they could potentially have used AI although this wasn’t permitted.
Ninety-four percent of university exam submissions created using ChatGPT weren’t detected as being generated by artificial intelligence, and these submissions tended to get higher scores than real students’ work.The AI-generated answers were submitted alongside real students’ work, and accounted for, on average, 5 per cent of the total scripts marked by academics. The markers weren’t informed that they were checking the work of 33 fake students who generated answers from ChatGPT.
The assessments included two types of questions: short answers and longer essays. The prompts given to ChatGPT began with the words “Including references to academic literature but not a separate reference section”, then copied the exam question.
Across all modules, only 6 per cent of the AI submissions were flagged as potentially not being a student’s own work,though in some modules, no AI-generated work was flagged as suspicious. “On average, the AI responses gained higher grades than the real student submission, although there was some variability across modules.
Currently,the AI tends to struggle with more abstract reasoning and integration into information. The total submission were 63 AI and there was an 83.4 per cent chance that the AI work outscored that of the students.
The researchers claim that their work is the largest and most robust study of its kind to date. Although the study only checked work on the University,although it is a concern for the whole academic sector.
The workload for academics expected to mark work also doesn’t help their ability to pick up AI fakery.
Tackling it at source is going to be near-impossible,as the sector must instead reconsider what it is assessing although it is going to take the sector a whole to acknowledge the fact.
In conclusion,university should make available AI detectors to its staff to help in the easy detection of AI work by student as lot of student make use of various AI site in their work which make them less creative in their own words.