AI revolution is finally upon us, and the developments that made it into our wildest dreams as well as our nightmares are finally happening. One major development is the impact of its text generators on the education sector.
In the education sector, we can see two opposing views on this matter. The first opinion is of educators who think that the use of AI tools can hamper the academic performance of students. The second opinion is presented by students who want to delegate certain activities including memorization and research to these tools and remain focused on tasks that need a higher level of intelligence.
One primary concern of both groups is about assignment writing. Can this tool help the students in writing their assignments? If a student only wants proofreading help, can ChatGPT or other AI tools help with that?
Here are some pros and cons to deduce answers to these questions. Keep in mind that these answers are highly subjective and will vary with every student and every assignment depending on the skills assessed by the assignment.
Pros of Using ChatGPT for Assignment Writing
Let’s start with checking out some pros of using this AI bot.
It Saves Time
This is the most quoted advantage of ChatGPT by every user in every sector. After all, AI is about saving time and effort, right? All you need to do is to give it your prompt and it will send back an essay or paragraph with the word count you needed. Let’s not talk about the compromise on the quality it makes to serve fresh and hot assignments promptly.
It Does It Homework
Even if students aren’t the ones who are doing their homework, their AI partner makes sure to do its homework. Whenever it answers your query, it does so by collecting information from hundreds or thousands of sources.
To say that it is a research-savvy, hardworking assistant would be an understatement. It works like a horse to bring your required assignment.
It Takes Care of Grammar
Assignments written by ChatGPT follow standard grammar and syntax rules. What’s even better – you don’t have to prompt the tool to write in grammatically accurate language. Instead, language usage is part of the package you get with your assignment prompts.
If you want to get assignment editing and proofreading help for an assignment you have completed manually, these tools can also provide you with that service. Not only will it scan your document for spelling mistakes but will also improve its grammar and syntax.
Cons of Using ChatGPT
It isn’t wrong to claim that ChatGPT produces content with prevailing language rules. Still, its language doesn’t appear human which is a big issue for most users and acts as the biggest con of this service. Let’s consider this and other cons in this section.
Compromises Academic Integrity
The biggest issue with ChatGPT-like tools is that they allow students to shift their focus from learning. Assignments are meant to help students build their skills and see their weaknesses for further improvement. Both of these goals can only be achieved if the students take their time to solve the problem in the given assignment.
However, ChatGPT allows students to delegate every task from research and analysis to writing and editing to it. Consequently, they don’t feel the need to perform in assignments to get good grades.
Lack of Human Intelligence
Many students circumvent the issue of compromised academic integrity by researching the assignment using their instructor’s guidelines and using this tool to write the assignment. Still, the tool offers them content that appears robotic and monotonous.
It’s not a hidden fact that ChatGPT is a bot that mimics humans. This imitation is quite reasonable but far from perfect. It’s boring and can easily force the readers to lose attention. So, students can’t use the assignments produced by this tool to earn good grades.
Lack of Certain Skills
Robots are made by numbers for numbers. Mathematics is the basic science that helped build computers. Still, it’s ironic that this computer-based tool doesn’t know much about calculations. You can get basic arithmetic and algebraic calculations done from it for sure, but beyond that, this tool fails.
Even if you wanted to use ChatGPT for your assignments, it would only stare back at you or give you jumbled-up, nonsensical answers.
Not a Perfect Online Assignment Proofreader
The best thing ChatGPT can do is edit your assignment draft, but many students won’t allow it to do that as well. Why this tool is not good enough for assignment editing and proofreading, you may ask? The answer is simple, it doesn’t detect all the mistakes.
The application is built as a text creator not as an editor. Its primary purpose is to keep an eye on already published content and collect data from it to write answers. Although AI learning has enabled it to write grammatically correct sentences, the content it uses to teach itself is full of errors. These errors can and do seep into its learning and make it an error-prone software to detect grammatical mistakes.
Biased Research
Just like any other AI-based tool, ChatGPT bases its answers on information collected from the information sources available on the internet. Any error present in these pieces of information is picked up by it as correct because it doesn’t have judgment like humans.
Similarly, while writing assignments it tends to focus on those opinions that are well-accepted and well-repeated on the internet. The authenticity and accuracy of these opinions don’t matter to it. Consequently, it can present an argument that is factually incorrect, compromising the marks obtained by the student.
Wrapping Up
This post talks about the merits and demerits of using ChatGPT as an assignment writing help. While the tool helps students in saving their time, it fails them on other fronts including the quality of the paper, learning outcomes they could get from doing their assignment themselves, and the credibility of the facts included in the assignment. In the end, students cannot use it without doing their research and knowing the right prompts to request their assignments.
