ChatGPT continues to be part of the constant buzz on online platforms such as Twitter as well as in physical spaces like lecture halls. This leads one to wonder when this buzz will turn into a clearer tone that can be heard during lectures and classes the world over. Thinking closer to home, what do UP students think about ChatGPT? And can ChatGPT be useful for students? If so, how?
To start with, it seems that although the conversation about ChatGPT has caught on like wildfire, the trend of using ChatGPT is still in its early stages at UP. Just over half of UP students polled on the question said that they have tried to use this latest language model from OpenAI as a tool to assist with their studies. This suggests that while some would claim that ChatGPT is central to the current cultural landscape, the adoption of ChatGPT in formal learning spaces is only beginning to take more noticeable strides.
Looking to the future, however, it seems that UP students want lecturers to at least allow the use of ChatGPT as a learning tool. This is evident in the 60% of students who voted in the PDBY polls in favour of being allowed to use ChatGPT. This pushes the conversation that much deeper, since this is the point at which the controversy seems to arise most prominently – not only at UP but in many learning institutions. With at least some lecturers and students currently being heavily against the use of ChatGPT for learning, the matter is far from settled. One UP student even commented in a PDBY poll that ChatGPT is a “blight on academia”. However, many other UP students hold a very different opinion. These students say that ChatGPT is “sometimes better than a lecturer” at simplifying complex ideas.
But how are UP students currently using ChatGPT? The answers seem to vary about as widely as the creators of this large language model could have hoped – and perhaps even more so. Specific uses identified in a poll of UP students range from debugging Python code to explaining philosophical concepts. Despite the large variation in uses, an interesting throughline connects these answers. This throughline is that many UP students are not using ChatGPT as a once-off answer generation tool, but as a sort of sparring partner for their ideas. UP students far and wide are finding that ChatGPT can help them to think more clearly about complex ideas.
An ever-growing number of students at UP are realising – as one UP student studying to become a high school English teacher said – that ChatGPT offers “new ways of discovering meaning” and can offer “the initial spark that gets the fire started”. Thus, when it comes to learning, there is an elephant-sized question sitting in every lecture hall: What does the future hold for ChatGPT as a legitimate learning tool at UP?
