Chatgpt seems definitely joined in the classroom, which suggests teachers for the necessary challenges: ‘You can never catch them in the act’

To practice searching for historical sources, Thomas (17) once had to find an image of a « King’s Day long ago » for history. Did not work. So he decided to generate chatgpt such an image. He rejected his teacher, because yes, it was clear to see that it was not a real historical image.

Thomas is sitting with Anne (16), Vainavi (17), Meis (17) and Bram (17) in half a circle in a classroom of the Lorentz Casimir Lyceum in Eindhoven, a school for HAVO, Atheneum and Gymnasium. The boys are in 4 HAVO and the girls in 5 VWO. Their economic teacher Merlijn Gerritsen has put them together with NRC Talk about the use of chatgpt for school work. He is also present at the conversation.

Yes, you can have students write everything by hand, but I think that’s a little old -fashioned crampiness

The other students cannot name an example of an assignment in which they used chatgpt unauthorized. Whether they have never actually done that can hardly be checked, because the ‘chance of being caught’ is low. Plagiarism scanners almost never recognize chatgpt texts, because the system generates unique texts.

A low chance of being caught does not mean that you will never be caught. In a classmate of Bram, the scanner hit red when his CKV report was taken through it. Grade: 1. And he did not get a resit. Bram: « Yes, that wakes you up. You don’t have to constantly grab chatgpt, because they can find out. »

Suspicion

But that is not easy, say teachers with whom NRC for this article spoke. There were – including Gerritsen – six, from secondary schools throughout the country. They give different subjects, from English to Physics.

Occasionally they have their suspicions. If a student suddenly uses words that do not fit with his or her vocabulary, for example. « One once wrote ‘Chloroplast’ instead of ‘leaf green grain’, » says biology teacher Furkan Soysal of the Melanchton Kralingen, a VMBO school in Rotterdam. Merlijn Gerritsen from the Lorentz Casimir Lyceum says that you can sometimes also see it in the punctuation. « You see that chatgpt often puts a comma for ‘and’. » However, they can almost only prove their suspicions if a student admits the use.

There are no official figures, but teachers notice that more and more students – permitted and unauthorized – use chatgpt. Where the application was hardly used in schools shortly after the introduction at the end of 2022, ‘Chat’ is now a loyal friend for many students.

It places schools and teachers for a dilemma: do they have to keep chatgpt out of education as much as possible or embrace it correctly?

« I find it a very difficult, » says Gert Verbrugghen, teacher of English at the Alfrinkcollege, a VMBO school in Deurne (Noord-Brabant). « In any case, I don’t encourage it, in the sense that I integrate their use into an assignment. I am afraid that the children will outsource their thinking too much to Chatgpt. I am now leaving them more in writing in the classroom. That is the only way to know for sure if they really control the material. »

The same applies to Juliëtte Jansen, teacher of Dutch at the same school. « But we already did a lot of class and in writing, so the change is not that great. » Her students do not have to write a reading report by hand; That is allowed with a laptop in the class « and then some students are smart enough; you will never be at the laptops on time to catch them in the act on the use of chatgpt. But you can see it from certain language use. Asking is important. »

Jansen also tries to show students that Chatgpt does not always give the correct answers. « Sometimes they ask: » Madam, do you see it when I let Chatgpt make my reading report?  » Then I let them do that in my presence and I can often point them out in the first or second line about the book that was not right. « 

Weak

Merlijn Gerritsen, the economic teacher of the Lorentz Casimir Lyceum, tries to take advantage of those weak spots of Chatgpt, for example by coming up with assignments where students have to get the mistakes from Chatgpt’s answers. « Yes, you can let students write everything by hand, but I think that’s a little old -fashioned crampiness. »

He shows an example on the IWB. It is a paper that Bram made together with a classmate. On the front page it says: « The impact of international trade on the Dutch economy. » Bram: « The assignment was to put the sub -questions in Chatgpt and then to do research with Google Scholar (a search engine for scientific literature). Then we had to show the similarities and differences between Chatgpt’s answers and the literature. »

For the second sub -question – « What is the impact on employment in the Netherlands between 2015 and 2025? » – For example, Bram saw that Chatgpt had made a mistake in the percentage of industrial jobs on the total number of employee jobs. That would be around 10 percent. « Chatgpt gets information from many different sources, making it sometimes wrong. I checked those sources, made a calculation myself and then I came to about 7 percent. »

We should not think that because of generative AI we suddenly need fewer people in education

Every teacher at the Lorentz Casimir Lyceum deals with Chatgpt differently. But when it comes to the profile paper, the final paper on HAVO and VWO, new agreements have recently been made at school level. Gerritsen: « At the end of last year I went to the school management and I said: we have to get on this train, we can’t get ostriches. Then I quickly got hearing, that was nice. » From the management he was allowed to rewrite the manual for the profile paper.

This school year you saw a « very uneven playing field » when making the profile paper, says Gerritsen. « There are children who have written a piece of work with chatgpt and achieved an 8 in five hours and others who have worked on it for eighty hours and come out on a 6. But the problem is that you cannot prove suspicions. »

The adapted manual will apply for the students who are in the classroom today in the coming school year. Half of the figure for the profile paper is determined by the workpiece itself and the other half by an oral exam in which the student must defend the paper and answer questions from two teachers.

Permissible

In what way does the students actually use chatgpt as a permissible tool? Vainavi: « We had to design a game for computer science. Then I asked Chatgpt if he had a few ideas for a fun game within the framework of the assignment. I found that really handy. In the end I opted for a fairy tale theme. » She also uses it to make a schedule, if she has a lot to do and has lost the overview. « Then I indicate which homework I have, which tests, which agreements and then I ask for a schedule for the coming week or a few weeks. »

Anne asks Chatgpt during learning, for example, to explain a concept better, if she finds the explanation in her schoolbook unclear. She does not use the chatbot to make summaries. « I like to do that yourself. On tests you sometimes get stories from which you have to get the most important thing. » Also Meis also tries not to use Chatgpt too much for school. « For example, if I have to hand in a report, I read my text carefully and if I have no doubt about anything, I just hand it in. It is not that I have it checked by Chatgpt by default. »

According to Inge Molenaar, it is very important that students learn to deal with chatgpt. Molenaar is professor of Education and Artificial Intelligence at Radboud University and director of National Education Lab AI (Nolai). That ‘lab’, funded by the National Groeifonds, is a collaboration between scientists, education and business. They develop innovative AI applications for education and conduct research into the consequences of artificial intelligence for education. For example, they investigate how students learn with AI. Molenaar: « You see that students really want to learn to use generative AI (such as Chatgpt) in such a way that they actually learn something about it, but they need help with that. »

Learn from it

It is tempting for students to be pure and alone, as Molenaar calls it, for ‘performance« To choose. » They let chatgpt make the school assignment as quickly and as well as possible and they hand it in. But better if they have used chatgpt and learned from it, because they have had to actively process the generated information.  » Molenaar finds the assignment from economic teacher Gerritsen a good example of this.

« We always give schools the advice: don’t try to forbid it, because that doesn’t work. » Molenaar therefore thinks that investments should not be made in better plagiarism scanners, but in new ways of testing. « In addition, the relationship between teacher and student is very important, because the closer the teacher is with the students, the better he can judge what they can and cannot do. We should not think that because of generative AI we suddenly need fewer people in education. »

You have those websites where you can enter your text from Chatgpt and that makes it more human. I don’t know if it really works

Some teachers use chatgpt in their assignments as if it was an assistant for the students. For example, Stefanie van den Steen, teacher of nature and chemistry at the Haganum gymnasium in The Hague, had her students built a robot with chat assistance. « They were allowed to have their codes generated by chatgpt, but experience shows that he still needs a lot and very specific instructions, so he acted best as an assistant, to check the codes. And if the students wanted something extra, for example having a light blink, they were also allowed to ask how to chat. »

Ahmed Kasmi programmed an AI help for his students. He is a geography teacher at Focus College, an Islamic VMBO-T-School in Amersfoort, and gives workshops on AI in education as self-employed. « Before my final exam classes, I designed a customized version of Chatgpt. It asks questions at exam level about specific topics. Students answer and get immediate feedback from the system. I have set it to work as a exam trainer. All I have to do is share the link with them. »

Chatgpt is used permitted and unauthorized. At the Lorentz Casimir Lyceum in Eindhoven, Bram, Thomas Anne, Meis, Vainavi talk about it with their teacher Merlin.

Photo Mona van den Berg

Humanity

Furkan Soysal, the biology teacher of the Melanchton Kralingen, has also come up with something: « I sometimes let students ask Chatgpt questions and then I give them the assignment to rewrite Chatgpt’s answer in their own words. That’s how I try to understand what the answer exactly means. »

The students in the classroom of the Lorentz Casimir Lyceum see tips on social media to use chatgpt in a one -rarely way. Thomas: « I read that chatgpt often uses the M-dash (thought strip), I don’t know what it is called in Dutch. » If you remove it, your text will look much less suspicious. But you don’t even have to do that yourself, Vainavu knows. « You have those websites where you can enter your text from Chatgpt and that makes it more human. I don’t know if it really works. » Thomas: « Yes, and then even the percentage of humanity is included! »

The students’ surnames are known to the editors.

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