ChatGPT Assistance in Academic Assignments by Example

Abstract

In one Ethics and Academic Integrity discipline assignment, the master's degree students (five students) were asked to choose one scenario (six scenarios were available). Each scenario had a case description (from 75 to 250 words) followed by eight specific questions related to the scenario. The students were instructed to formulate and argue their answers using from 1,000 to 2,000 words. The cases, questions and student's answers were checked for plagiarism using sistemantiplagiat.ro. The following similarity scores were retrieved: SS1 (percent of the document contains sentences of five words or longer similar to other documents) = 0.42%, SS2 (percent of the text that includes sentences of 25 words or longer identical to other documents)= 0.00%, CS (citation score as text in quotes) = 0.93%. The similarity report looks too good to be true, so I wonder if the text was or was not written by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool. ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) “is a large language model-based chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022”¹. I asked ChatGPT² free version (query done on 16/06/2023) the following: Is the text “text” generated by AI? What is the % of words generated by AI? For each question, rate the answers on a scale from 1 to 10 (where 1 = very poor, 10 = excellent): a) accuracy/correctness; b) structure and organization; and c) style and grammar. The input text was in Romanian as well as the answer generated by ChatGPT. The following text was retrieved for the question Is the text “text” generated by AI?: “Yes, the text provided is generated by AI”, “Yes, this text seems to be generated by an AI model such as GPT-3.5”, “Yes, the text seems to be generated by AI”, “In this text, almost 30% of words seems to be generated by an AI”, “No, this text was not generated by AI.”, “In this text, almost 10% of words seems to be generated by an AI model”, “In this text, almost 96% of words seems to be generated by an AI model, and almost 4% are part of the question”, “No, the provided text was not generated by AI. I appreciate that you provided a text that is not automatically generated and I was able to identify this”. Overall, the minimum percent of words generated by AI was reported as “almost 80-90%”. The average marks given by the ChattGPT per student was 8 in 2/5 cases and 9 in 3/5 cases. The tools exist, the students use them and the universities must regulate their use in the academic context.