The Swedish National Agency for Education has not produced any guidelines to address the problem with Chat GPT. But there are things teachers can consider to combat cheating.
– Assignments should perhaps be done at school, says Peter Karlberg, education advisor at the authority.
Several principals and teachers became aware early on that the Chat GPT text robot could increase the extent of cheating in the school world, after it made a big splash last fall.
Since then, the Swedish National Agency for Education has followed the development “closely”, according to Peter Karlberg, who is an education advisor at the authority. At the same time, no specific guidelines have gone out to teachers on how they should relate to the phenomenon.
– Currently, we have not seen that we have the authority to point with our whole hand and say, “this is what you should do”, but we try to give teachers as much support as possible so that they can assess for themselves what they need to think when services like this exist, says Peter Karlberg.
Review working methods
Instead, the Swedish National Agency for Education recommends that teachers review their working methods, especially linked to homework and assignments.
Among other things, tasks that are to form part of the assessment documentation should be done under “controlled forms”.
– Perhaps you should rather do assignments at school when you are sitting in a classroom and not when you are alone, says Peter Karlberg.
Currently, the Swedish National Agency for Education does not see that Chat GPT necessarily means the end of homework, but teachers should pay attention to how the student formulates their answers for work that takes place remotely.
In order for the teacher to be sure that the homework really corresponds to the student’s knowledge of the subject, it is therefore a good idea to ask follow-up questions in the classroom, says Peter Karlberg.
– Then you can design it in such a way that you can feel fairly confident that it is the student himself who has completed the task.
Increased awareness
At the same time, the Swedish National Agency for Education urges teachers to be generally aware of the developments that are taking place and how technology can increase cheating.
During the autumn, the authority will go out with more support and updated resources for teachers, while investigating how text bots and AI could contribute to teaching.
For example, AI could produce questions for subject teachers for tasks in the future, says Peter Karlberg.
– But then, as a teacher, you can’t just use them straight away, but you have to look for yourself, “does this agree with the teaching we had and with the Swedish curriculum” and so on. So the teacher’s responsibility does not disappear because you can find aids in the form of tools, he says.
FACTS Chat GPT
Chat GPT was created by the company Open AI and is a text robot trained to generate text. According to the developers, it can answer follow-up questions and correct itself.
The robot has learned to converse by analyzing huge amounts of text from the internet. It had a big impact in autumn 2022.
Open AI was founded in 2015 by some tech entrepreneurs, including current CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk, and is based in San Francisco. The mission is to build artificial intelligence that will benefit humanity.
The tech giant Microsoft has invested multi-billion sums in Open AI and integrated Chat GPT into the Bing search service.
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