Can AI be more than just a cheating machine for students?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

The explosion of AI chatbots that can spit out flawless five-paragraph essays,

summarize texts, translate languages, and even in some cases complete multi-step math equations,

has created a big problem for educators.

How do you stop students from cheating or verify that they've learned

anything? Some teachers have moved to ban the technology, but others are finding ways to integrate it

and teach their students how to be better than the bots. I'm Christy Gurdherry. I am an associate teaching professor of English and director of the

Writing Center at Babson College and Wellesley, Massachusetts. So at Babson, I work with an

interdisciplinary group of faculty called The Generator. And so the generator kind of started in fall 2023, and we just started having conversations

around how are these tools impacting what's happening in the classrooms, in our daily lives,

and we got some modest funding.

And so we had over 30 institutions from all around the Boston area that came

together for a day and for the first tea party. We had a session on values-based approaches to AI.

Another session led about leading with like an ethic of care about how AI detectors

tend to flag already marginalized students more often and then also brought in a panel of

students, really blowing up notions that it's just a cheating machine, and it's something for us to work through

together. We'll be right back. You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

We're back with Christy Gurdherry, a professor at Babson College. I kind of have a mantra going

with my students now, but I always say, like, you have to be better than a robot.

We talk about prompt engineering, and I, do you think that that's kind of a misnomer?

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