ChatGPT: Lecturer from Oldham slates students using AI answers

Dr Jared Ahmad, 43, is a lecturer in Journalism, Politics and Communication at the University of Sheffield.

After receiving A-level results which were ‘not strong’ from North Chadderton, Dr Ahmad did not originally attend university.

He said: “I went to university quite late in life because when I was much younger, I didn’t apply myself as well as lots of my students have done.

“I didn’t get particularly strong A-level results, I worked for probably about 10 years.”

When Dr Ahmad was 28, he applied to Salford University as a mature student, before going on to the University of Manchester for a Master’s and PhD.

Sign up to our newsletters to get the latest stories sent straight to your inbox.

He added: “I really enjoyed the research side of things, and I was lucky enough to get funding for a PhD, I had some really encouraging supervisors, so along the way I got rid of any doubts and uncertainties I had about my own poor A-level results, and I just enjoyed the environment."

However, recently the lecturer has found that students are giving answers which look suspiciously like those generated by the AI language model ChatGPT.

The chatbot allows people to type messages and receive answers, powered by artificial intelligence.

However, technology hasn’t been without controversy. While some use the tool for innocuous questions such as ‘tell me the best things about Oldham’, some schools have banned it or are even moving away from homework essays over cheating concerns.

Dr Ahmad told The Oldham Times that he sees ChatGPT as a valuable tool for teaching – but with downsides too.

Follow The Oldham Times on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube.

The lecturer’s suspicions were raised when he was marking an essay in his module on visual political communications.

Dr Jared Ahmad, from Chadderton, is a lecturer at the University of Sheffield (Image: Dr Jared Ahmad)

The questions ranged from: ‘How do politicians use images in their communications?’ and ‘How are images transforming world politics?’.

Making clear that his opinions weren't necessarily those of the university, he said: “I was marking a series of essays, and some of the responses seemed quite generic and similar.

“Because a lot of the students I teach are international students, I suspected they may have been using ChatGPT to generate a response.

“So I opened up ChatGPT and started typing in some of the questions, and the responses from ChatGPT were quite similar to the answers the students were providing – not identical, just quite formulaic, so I suspected some of the students may have been using ChatGPT.

“They were very short sentences, very tight responses, but really quite abstract – there were no illustrative examples, few references, just generic statements. The type of thing ChatGPT is really good at producing.”

Can ChatGPT be used for good?

Dr Ahmad also finds ChatGPT useful as a teaching aide.

The lecturer uses the AI tool to prompt discussion in class.

He explained: “One really positive thing about where I work and what me and some of my colleagues have been doing is trying to find ways of using ChatGPT in our assessments.

“One thing we try and introduce in seminar teaching is, if I ask a question, if you type that into ChatGPT we can have a critical discussion surrounding the strengths and the weaknesses surrounding the response from ChatGPT.

“I use that technique in a way to show students that it’s a really good resource, but at the same time there’s problems with it.

“The kinds of teaching we encourage an the kinds of responses we encourage from students is to engage with these debates to critically analyse them and find the areas of weakness.”

Long-term, Dr Ahmad and his team are looking for assessment formats where ChatGPT can’t be used – such as analysing images, which ChatGPT can’t do at the moment.

Commercialisation of higher education

In a Twitter thread where he shared his ChatGPT suspicions, Dr Ahmad said we had created the ‘whole mess for ourselves’, tweeting: “By turning universities into callous, soul-sapping, profit-maximizing institutions we've forced our students to adopt the same, cold, realist approach when it comes to writing their essays or engaging in the subject matter.”

Dr Ahmad expanded on this point, saying: “It probably wasn’t as well thought out as it should have been, I was just voicing my frustrations.

“It’s not so much the university that’s like this, it’s the way society treats university.

"Historically university education is about developing your knowledge, learning new skills, how to formulate arguments, how to conduct good research, but I think for a lot of people in society, university education is just viewed as a gateway to a high-income job.

“It’s not just about that, it’s about creating the kind of skills that improve society, and create a more just and equal society.

“I don’t see that anymore. I guess this is a broader critique about the way society treats UK university education as a gateway to a high-income job rather than a way to improve society.”

Should more Oldhamers go to university?

According to the most recent Census data, 24.6 per cent of Oldhamers have a level 4 qualification and above, meaning a degree (BA, BSc), higher degree (MA, PhD, PGCE), NVQ level 4 to 5, HNC, HND, RSA Higher Diploma, BTEC Higher level, professional qualifications (for example, teaching, nursing, accountancy).

This is much lower than the rate across England, where 33.9 per cent have this level of qualification, and it puts Oldham in the lowest 40 areas in the country, and the second lowest in Greater Manchester, just ahead of Tameside.

Dr Ahmad shared his opinion on the matter, adding: “I think one good thing is that we have really passionate and engaged teachers in Oldham. We’ve also got some very good schools as well. North Chadderton is a very good school, Blue Coat.

“I think more effort needs to be done at a government level to encourage younger people to stay on for A-levels and university, and I think one thing that could really change there would be tuition fees.

“Tuition fees are a big barrier for people from lower income backgrounds.”

“Reducing tuition fees and finding some other way of funding university-level education, or having bursaries and fee waivers for people from lower income backgrounds would be another thing.

"Having teachers within good schools like North Chadderton going out into the community, encouraging kids to stay on and go on to higher education.

He concluded: “Although teachers were encouraging everyone to go to university, it’s not something I personally was encouraged to do. If you have more of that, that would encourage people to stay on.”