ChatGPT on the college campus

Recently I’ve been teaching courses online, and wrote this for my students.I thought it was worth discussing publicly. Here goes.

Tools like ChaptGPT index the entire web, so they know things about major sites like Instagram. That means when you are asked to analyze a mobile app, it is possible (and an academic integrity violation) to take the question of the week, cut/paste it into chatGPT, and turn that in as an answer.

Please don’t do this.

Please, please, please don’t do this.

Obviously, you’ll be robbing yourself of an educational opportunity. It isn’t fair to the rest of the students. If everyone did it, the long-term quality of the SNHU graduates would decrease, which would hurt opportunities for you and your fellow graduates.

But also, important: Even if you manage to get away with it, ChatGPT will tend produce poor answers that can result in a mediocre to poor grade.

For today I’ll say this: Strive to give real answers that are based on your own lived experience. Good writing tends to tell, not show.

You can recognize this in literature. In Les Miserables, the book does not tell you that Jean Val Jean is strong; it has him lift the main mast of a ship and carry it when know one else can. (If you like musicals, I’ll put the video below. If not feel, free to skip. :-)