ChatGPT Ate My Homework

A word directed to our professors.

To the educators reading this, 
As a student I thought it might be useful to share the types of assignments I personally would like to see now that we exist in a post ChatGPT world.

We need assignments that make us limit test AI usage. I.e. designing certain assignments that explicitly explore boundaries. Maybe an assignment to complete an analysis task both with and without AI assistance, then critically compare the results. Or perhaps reading an academic paper ourselves before comparing our understanding with an AI-generated summary. Or have different groups work on the same assignment, one with AI, the other without. These "limit testing" exercises could make it explicit to me about the dangers of over-reliance on AI, but instead to gain an intuition of how far I could rely on it and then swap to my own skills. Make it clear where AI excels and where human judgment is better. Creating this safe space to experiment would help us develop our own discernment. 

Secondly, I hate PDFs. It's a limiting file format, and I'm annoyed that the foundations of science, and everything I do here at TU/e in the end is a collection of PDFs hidden away in Canvas. In that way, I'm grateful for these AI tools, how they threaten the written word as the "final stage" of our intellectual outputs. Perhaps students have to demonstrate understanding in other ways? Video essays, in class discussions, collages.

Finally, I’d love to hear from YOU. How do you feel about the rise of AI-assisted submissions? Can you tell when we’ve used AI? Does it feel disrespectful—or does it not matter if the work meets learning objectives? I’m genuinely curious. ;-)

You can reach me at k.s.paranganat@student.tue.nl

Karan Paranganat
Aided with Claude 3.7 Sonnet

March 2025