by Aidan Montoya
At McPherson College, teachers like to use a website called Turn It In, to check student’s homework for plagiarism and/or the use of AI. Turnitin is a web-based program that checks papers for plagiarism. It works by comparing the student’s work to a large database and is a tool that is used in many different universities and colleges. Chat GPT, on the other hand, is a chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to understand and generate human-like responses. Both, Turn It In and Chat GPT, could be preserved as tools for students. However, these two have trouble coexisting, since assignments done with Chat GPT are usually detected and flagged as plagiarism by Turn It In. But for the teachers at McPherson College, Turn It In has come with problems due to Bulldog Connect. Professor Kerry Dobbins says, “Bulldog Connect is the problem, and they will be working on bug fixes throughout the semester.”
So, while Turn It In can usually detect and stop AI, teachers at McPherson College have been having troubles with it because of Bulldog Connect. However, Turn It In is not the only way teachers detect AI. Kerry Dobbins claims, “Students write with a voice and when teachers get a bland lifeless paper, they know that it is AI.”
As for Chat GPT, it is not all bad. There are some benefits of using it, such as it helping with research, brainstorming, and even uncovering old documents. It is just not allowed to solely put in a prompt and let Chat GPT do all the work. Chat GPT might be ahead of its time and does not fit in a current school setting but then again it might be coming in the future. When asking people about it, the opinions on it and how it affects their studying, are however still very split.
