Chat’s out of the bag
The mood was high among university students two years ago, when ChatGPT made it possible to generate essays with just the click of a button.
“ChatGPT made things much easier for me,” reminisced a student at the University of Cyprus, a cheery humour to his voice. “You don’t even have to do the assignments anymore!”
Such shortcuts were precisely what unnerved educators when artificial intelligence tools first entered classrooms in 2022.
AI, however, has proven less of a threat to higher education than it once seemed. Universities are now responding to the rise of AI with flexible policies and open minds, hoping that the new technology can help students make the most of their education.
At the University of Cyprus, this shift is evident in a recently published list of recommendations for the role of ChatGPT in education. The guidelines advise faculty on how to incorporate the technology and establish rules for its use.
For the most part, the decision of whether to ban or allow ChatGPT is left to each instructor. “UCY encourages experimentation with available AI tools that aid the process of comprehension and learning,” the recommendation states.
But everyone must follow certain ethical principles: say when you’ve used AI, don’t copy the text verbatim, and you’re the one in trouble if there are any errors.
The newly formed University of Limassol has grappled with the same question.
“It is a challenge that all universities faced in the last two to three years,” said Assistant Professor Panagiotis Kosmas who holds a PhD in Educational Technology. “We are now in the process of developing a policy on the use of AI.”
At the University of Nicosia, faculty members can now access a webpage offering guidance on “how to use such technologies effectively.” A post from March 2024 predicts that “incorporating AI tasks into assignments will become the norm.”
Several instructors have taken advantage of these new policies. Professor Elpida Keravnou, who teaches undergraduate and graduate-level computer science courses at the University of Cyprus, is one of them.
“ChatGPT can be a useful education tool,” she explained. “There is a dialogue at the university about using AI constructively.”
For Keravnou, the tool’s greatest advantage is simply its ability to help students.
“I am happy for the students to “consult” ChatGPT,” she said. “We have always urged our students if they don’t know something and want a quick answer, to ‘Google it.’ Now they can use ChatGPT as a kind of an automatic teaching assistant.”
In her graduate courses, Keravnou has even made the new technology a part of her curriculum. Students are asked to perform a SWOT analysis on ChatGPT in a course on AI in healthcare. She describes this exercise as a “critical not passive” use of AI.
This open-minded view of ChatGPT as an attentive, helpful “automatic assistant” has gained traction elsewhere in Cyprus as well. Workers have turned to AI tools to offset the pressures of increasing workloads, as found in a recent survey by PwC Cyprus.
Students feel the same. Not all students rely on ChatGPT to blindly generate essays; even those who avoid such shortcuts find that AI can improve the quality of their assignment and help manage heavy workloads.
“I don’t think it’s a good writer, but I do use it for some things, like checking for grammar or that my sentences make sense,” said a sports management student at the University of Nicosia. She added that, “It is a helpful skill to have.”
In other words, students see the rising tide of AI in education not as a gimmick or a side-show, but as a matter of technological fluency. AI training is becoming a marketable skill, like Excel or Microsoft Word.
One researcher has observed the same. “I personally see the impact of ChatGPT mostly affecting the student experience,” said Dr Eleni Christodoulou, a lecturer at the University of Cyprus.
“Students pointed out that they were frustrated from mixed signals,” which was a finding from her joint study on student attitudes to ChatGPT. “They were also keen to have more training on how exactly to use these tools, what is allowed and what is not.”
In consequence, she believes that “it is important for universities to provide training not only to students but also to tutors.”
Still, the question remains: what about cheating?
To some extent, AI is its own worst enemy. The bot may be intelligent – but this intelligence is artificial, after all, and very often mistaken.
Neither Professor Keranvou nor Computer and Informatics Engineering Professor Sotirios Chatzis have faith in the capacity of AI chatbots to complete entire assignments, at least not to the standards they expect from students.
“ChatGPT gives programming code in a very stylistic manner, using features that first semester students are not taught, and hence you can easily spot such code,” Keravnou explained about her introductory computer science courses. “So cheating, if attempted, can be spotted.”
“Rarely does ChatGPT offer answers that fully align with the specific structure of the course they are being taught,” agreed Professor Chatzis.
Recognition of AI’s limitations is itself a valuable lesson. The ability to pick out where ChatGPT fibs and fails is also becoming a staple of technological literacy, a fact that has inspired Michalinos Zembylas to bring ChatGPT-debunking exercises into his classes at the Open University of Cyprus.
“Students realise on their own that they cannot rely on such tools without further research, analysis and scrutiny,” he explained.
Zembylas has researched the impact of ChatGPT on higher education alongside Christodoulou, and the pair’s findings mirror the general direction of AI policies being adopted by universities in Cyprus. Ultimately, it’s a matter of proactive yet measured steps.
“Universities should avoid letting students use it completely freely without checks and balances,” they agreed.
But the popular sentiment is that ChatGPT and other AI tools are here to say.
“The challenge is to establish the ‘right’ framework for their use,” said Zembylas. “Students will use these tools one way or another.”