AI: IB vs AP

 

No, my title isn’t in code. It’s a response to last week’s Boston Globe article by Simon Rabinovitch about the use of artificial intelligence in education.

          I know I’ve written about this before, but what I see for the future still bothers me. As teacher, I spent a hefty amount of time trying to get my students to use their brains and as an English teacher, their own words. I can’t even imagine how frustrating this task must be now, with chatbots like ChatGpt and Claude available to assemble the words for them.

          I often taught honors classes, and in my later teaching years in the International Baccalaureate Programme. One of my students' assignments was to write a simple summary paragraph about a particular piece of literature. One girl, rather than do it herself, copied something word-for-word from online and submitted it as her own.

          Of course, the vocabulary and style were dead giveaways, and all I had to do to prove this was search with a key phrase from her submission and up popped her source. I did what I’d warned the class I would do: I printed out the offending passage, made a copy of her homework, and sent it to her parents to explain why she would be receiving a 0.

 

 (If you’re not familiar with the IB program, it's a curriculum originally designed to provide uniform and credentialed instruction for students living in far-flung places. Our students’ exams – all in the form of essays – were scored not by us, but by IB examiners all around the world., thus guaranteeing uniformity of quality. As the IB coordinator, I would send our math exams to, perhaps, Brazil and our English ones to Cardiff, Wales, or biology to France.)

 

          I was also trained as an Advanced Placement teacher, another college-recognized honors program. Of the two, I’ve always thought IB to be the more rigorous. I’d seen some AP testing, and wondered how on earth you could test a student on literature using multiple choice questions. Where was the critical thinking, the shades of meaning only explained by essay?

          I wonder if students in the future will have the ability to write a thoughtful response themselves anymore. Perhaps soon the only way to determine if they’ve grasped the material will be through multiple choice. The horror.