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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 8955465" data-attributes="member: 7035894">I find it deeply ironic that the headline "ChatGPT is just spicy autocomplete" comes from a website calling itself "The Cleverest," because anyone paying even the remotest bit of attention would see that this technology is already causing massive disruptions. The question isn't whether large-language chatbots will change things, it is how profound those changes will be. At the minimum, you have what is already happening in the multi-trillion dollar education industry: a fundamental reassessment of traditional assessment models (not a bad thing!). At the maximum...well, no one knows where this is going, but the extreme predictions are pretty out there."This just demonstrates that humans are also capable of blagging it without knowing what they are talking about.The lesson is, don't use essays for assessment, they don't actually tell you that the student understands."So, that's a bit hyperbolic, but I agree that focusing on essays for assessment has been a problem for a long time. But essays are the cornerstone of higher level assessment in that multi-trillion dollar education industry, so its not as simple as saying "stop using essays." It's kind of like saying "just stop burning fossil fuels."Going back to my example, that essay is worth 2/3 of the final mark in a required course that allows the students to earn credit for having completed first year university. It was thought to be an unusually strong indicator of student individuality and creativity (written in the personal voice, using a mix of personal anecdotes and objective examples to buttress the argument, written over a period of months through stages that include 1. an interview with the teacher to discuss the initial outline, 2. written feedback from the teacher on a rough draft, and 3. one-on-one meetings with the teacher to discuss the final revision process, all of which are documented and reflected on by the student). Even so, it is ultimately sent anonymously to be assessed with 50,000+ other ToK essays. And ChatGPT can produce a very strong ToK essay that reads like the individual work of a talented student - I know, because I used it to write one, and I just kept adding iterations.So, okay, maybe we need to move away from essays as a primary assessment tool. But that is a HUGE change; it's not going to happen overnight. College admissions essays alone are a multi-billion dollar industry. So what replaces essays and other forms of standardized assessment? Ideally we would be assessing process rather than product and designing education around each individual learner's needs and strengths, but that is WAY more expensive. Standardized assessment didn't happen because it was best practice (it emphatically is not), it happened because it is cheap and easy to measure. So you can start to see the extent of the problem we are facing. I am on the team at my school that has been formed to try to figure out next steps, and every single school has formed such a team since December. And no one has answers yet.Large-language chatbots are already immensely impactful in just my occupation, and I know are having seismic effects in others. So these dismissive commentators are missing what is actually happening in the world in a remarkably obtuse and unhelpful way.I have to drive my kid to a school thing, but I have more thoughts on what this will specifically means for RPGs that I will post later.</blockquote>

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