The New York Times published a fascinating article on one Northeastern University’s student’s efforts to get a refund of her tuition. Ella Stapleton allegedly discovered that one of her professors used ChatGPT to generated the class notes that he distributed to the class on Canvas.
Said the NYT: “Ms. Stapleton filed a formal complaint with Northeastern’s business school, citing the undisclosed use of A.I. as well as other issues she had with his teaching style, and requested reimbursement of tuition for that class. As a quarter of the total bill for the semester, that would be more than $8,000.” But the request was denied. But the professor was contrite: “Rick Arrowood, her professor, was contrite about the episode. Dr. Arrowood, who is an adjunct professor and has been teaching for nearly two decades, said he had uploaded his class files and documents to ChatGPT, the A.I. search engine Perplexity and an A.I. presentation generator called Gamma to ‘give them a fresh look.’”
It’s quite interesting to learn that some students object to their professors using AI to help prepare course-related materials. Up until now, more of the media coverage has been about cheating by students or the debate over how to integrate AI (not A1) in the classroom. Stapleton’s complaint, though unsuccessful, does raise legitimate questions on whether and, if so, how professors should be relying on AI to generate course materials and exams. Asking AI to grade student exams would seem a gross dereliction of duty, but I wonder if any university has expressly prohibited it. But what if a professor uses AI to write parts or all of an exam? Is that OK? And, if so, should it be disclosed to the class? And if so, wouldn’t that give them an incentive to generate questions on AI in the hopes of reverse engineering the questions that might be on the final exam?