Since its launch last November, the chatbot has been a hot topic, capable of formulating detailed answers in seconds on a wide range of topics. A tool adopted by many students but which is debated in the teachers’ room.
When we talk about ChatGPT in front of high school students, we provoke laughter and quite quickly small confidences. “The week before the baccalaureate, I had a presentation, says a student. Since I was revising my baccalaureate, I didn’t have time to make time for the presentation. We did with ChatGPT and it gave me all my talk. Really I didn’t do anything and I got fifteen. So it’s okay, it’s cool.”
>> Pension reforms: ChatGPT was asked to write a speech by Emmanuel Macron
A comrade admits to having requested the conversational robot for his steps on the post-baccalaureate orientation platform Parcoursup: “I used ChatGPT to make my templates for my cover letters. You can do everything with it. It’s great! Me, it helped me a lot”.
I have the same motivation letter as all of France because of chat gpt but at least I finished pic.twitter.com/Gxp1aAEbLJ
— 𝐶 (@pocvntss) April 5, 2023
Letter, presentation… Of course, not all students use the artificial intelligence application, but those who have already tested it are well aware of the challenge it represents in terms of their learning. And it is already moving lines, observes Guillaume Marsault, high school history and geography teacher near Montpellier. He decided to stop grading homework: “I noticed that there were homework on which I had a big doubt, that they could have used software like ChatGPT or other”.
“I am not here to correct the work of a digital application, but to correct the work and help the students progress”.
Guillaume Marsault, history-geography professorat franceinfo
The subject is not consensual among teachers. While some see it as a pure and simple cheat, for others it is a tool that can be very useful. In his high school classes in Dijon, Mickaël Bertrand uses ChatGPT. Students have to rate and critique the app’s answers, and he too hasn’t given homework for quite a while: “We can’t, already for several years, since the Internet is there, Google is there. In fact, it’s normally been a while since we all became aware of the socio-educational inequalities linked to working at home and that normally , we are not supposed to give any more”he pleads.
A robot to correct copies or prepare lessons
For the professor, also an academic trainer, artificial intelligence is part of a long continuity of inventions: books, television, the Internet. “And each time, we always have a catastrophic discourse, which explains that the school is no longer useful and that the teachers will soon all be unemployedslips Mickaël Bertrand. However, in reality, all these technological innovations have led us to consider that we can go much further with the students thanks to these tools”.
Mickaël Bertrand is even considering using the conversational robot to help him correct copies or prepare lessons.
