“The IB believes that this AI technology will become part of our everyday lives – like spell checkers, translation software and calculators,” says Matt Glanville, head of assessment principles and practice at the IB. “We therefore need to adapt and transform our educational programmes and assessment practices so that students can use these new AI tools ethically and effectively. The IB is not going to ban the use of such software but will work with schools to help them support their students on how to use these tools ethically, in line with our principles of academic integrity.”

The IB’s official policy as of now is that students are allowed to quote from content created by ChatGPT in their essays and other graded assessments, but similar to quotes or materials adapted from outside sources, it must be credited in the body of text and appropriately referenced in the bibliography.

“Work produced by artificial intelligence tools – even only in part – will not be considered as a student’s own,” Glanville explains. “It must be clear that AI-generated work included in a piece of assessment has been taken from such software. If not, the student would be misrepresenting content as it was not originally written by them.”

Glanville understands that the emergence of ChatGPT will cause students to “test the boundaries” of what is acceptable and what is plagiarism. However, this phenomenon is something that IB has been dealing with since its inception.

“The issue of students being disempowered to think, whether because of too much support in completing their work or asking someone else to write it for them, is a long-standing variation of current issues that the IB is familiar with managing,” adds Glanville, who noted that IB teachers frequently have to deal with cases of essays bought from the internet from ‘essay mills’.

“Of course, these new technologies are significantly different in terms of speed, ease of access and scale, but the problem of students getting someone else to write their work for them has existed for many years.”

Because IB coursework requires frequent check-in meetings between students and educators, it is essential for the latter to ask students to expand on ideas that they have written about to ensure the work is actually their own. Glanville adds it is also important to pay attention to students’ workflow and watch them develop their work over a period of time. It is also up to the teacher’s best judgment to notice whether a student is suddenly producing work far beyond his/her regular capabilities within a very short period of time.

All that being said, ChatGPT also presents incredible educational opportunities which the IB has fully embraced. More importantly, most people expect the use of advanced AI software to be routine within a few years, and it is important to prepare students to be able to thrive in that kind of environment, both in the workplace and even within their personal lives. It is therefore up to educators to equip students with the necessary life skills and understanding.

“Students will need more expertise in identifying and addressing bias,” Glanville says. “All work produced by AI is based on the information it has ‘learned’ from, and particularly in today’s internet this is heavily biased by its human authors. Students need to understand that AI will inherit the bias and blind spots of its programmers, or source material in the case of self-learning systems.”

He adds that IB students may be asked to evaluate AI-produced essays and refine the prompts – the question(s) that are fed into ChatGPT to produce the work – to get the essay closer to what they want. Just as with AI art software, a small tweak to a prompt can dramatically alter what ChatGPT ultimately produces. Creating good prompts, therefore, is a valuable skill in itself.

“Students will continue to learn to think around problems and be creative, rather than seeking simple answers or following a routine process,” Glanville says. “Even today, AI tools can complete the latter more quickly and effectively, while creative problem-solving is where students can excel.”

ChatGPT is still an extremely new phenomenon, having been released in November of last year. As such, the IB’s policies are still evolving, and will continue to evolve accordingly.

A balanced response

“In summary, we believe AI is not a crisis in education or assessment, but it does create significant challenges and opportunities,” Glanville adds. “In the short term, we must teach students the ethical use of AI for assessments and the IB is well placed with assessment tasks that focus on understanding and not the coherence of written answers. However, in the medium to longer term, IB education practices will need to evolve as these types of tools improve and become a significant part of everyday life.”

Regardless of the policies the IB has in place, it will be up to schools and teachers to learn, adapt and become students’ role models on how to use AI in an ethical way.

Fortunately for Hong Kong, it has some of the best IB schools and teachers in the world. Even though ChatGPT has been slower to catch on in the city because it still cannot be accessed without using a VPN, schools have started hosting discussions and workshops to remain a step ahead on the issue.

Ryan Yue, director of educational technology at American School Hong Kong (ASHK), called the eventual prominence of ChatGPT and similar software in the classroom “inevitable”. He believes that the challenges educators face regarding AI resemble those that came about when the internet exploded in the early 2000s.

“When the internet first came to schools, it brought us a new learning experience, but at the same time, it also came with some unexpected issues, such as plagiarism,” says Yue. “We believe that students will get used to using ChatGPT positively, just like we did with the internet all those years ago.”

Yue is optimistic that AI tools will ultimately create a great deal of value for students and teachers, particularly in terms of freeing up time currently spent on certain more tedious and time-consuming tasks that could be better used elsewhere.

“It definitely helps with consolidating information on the internet – whether we’re writing an essay, designing a product, or doing a STEAM project, researching and gathering information is an essential part of the learning process, but it is usually very time-consuming,” he says.

“With AI tools like ChatGPT, we can gather the information we need from different sources on the internet more effectively. Without spending so much time searching for information, students can focus more on understanding and applying which pieces of information they need for their learning.

“With AI, students can do more than they expect,” he continued. “Education in the future could be more creative and more focused on subject knowledge and critical thinking skills.”

Just the beginning

Yue says that ASHK students are “very smart and hungry for technology” and, as a result, have become familiar with ChatGPT more quickly than teachers. And because ChatGPT isn’t officially available in Hong Kong, students are experimenting with its competitors, such as Poe Chatbot and you.com. Bing has also recently released their own large-language tool: a Google-like search engine with similar properties to ChatGPT.

But while these programmes are making great technological leaps, so too are those used to counter AI-related plagiarism and fraud. Yue has ensured ASHK – an IB school – is fully equipped with this software, including Turnitin, a well-known plagiarism detection system that will be able to detect texts generated from ChatGPT and GPTZero, an AI-text classification tool.

Yue is also prepared for any future challenges and opportunities that may arise from additional developments in AI that many believe will take place over the next decade.

“We believe that ChatGPT is just the start of the game, and AI will be able to do a lot more than just chatting and generating text,” Yue adds. “More media formats of data will be managed by AI in the future. AI can already create digital images and videos, and soon will be able to automatically generate computer programs for you according to your requests.”