One year after Chat-GPT was rolled out to the general public, the Sphinx polling institute and Compilatio, a company specialised in academic fraud prevention, have published the results of their survey about IA in education. It has been conducted in French universities between 21 June and 15 August 2023 near 1,242 teachers and 4,443 students.
The results illustrate the fears but also the needs of the academic world, and invite projections for positive developments in learning.
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Already 1 in 2 students (55%) declare using a generative AI tool at least occasionally.
And yet, 9 out of 10 teachers (88%) think that students use artificial intelligence occasionally or frequently for their work.
YES
51% of students use content-generating tools to better understand some topics.
NO
Generative AI tools do not replace search engines: 77% of students still say they use search engines as their main source of documentation. And AI is cited as the "1st source of documentation" by only 2%.
NOT REALLY
"Only 2 out of 5 students (43%) say they use AI as a "writer", 28% of whom reformulate AI-generated texts before incorporating them into their work.
The AI's role is more like that of a "writing assistant" to improve syntax and reformulate a written text.
- 3 out of 4 students (75%) think that this use is acceptable;
- 2 out of 3 teachers (67%) also think this is acceptable.
Three quarters of teachers (76%) and two thirds of students (65%) agree that using AI for homework or exams is cheating.
Nearly 2/3 of teachers and students share the same opinion and are against banning AI.
72% of students and 81% of teachers are concerned about the impact of AI on the future of learning. There are many risks and limits to ChatGPT or equivalent: plagiarism, copyright infringement, misinformation, distortion of critical and creative thinking, reducing writing skills, etc.
What students say:
"[By using these AIs, I'm looking for] time savings in writing long, well-constructed paragraphs particularly for tedious assignments without much practical interest."
Student - 18-21 years old - Security and environment
"I'm an engineering student, studying design and innovation: when my English work requires me to invent a story worthy of a schoolboy's tale, ChatGPT does it for me. I prefer to focus on work and projects with more significance for my career."
Student - 18-21 years old - Mechanics, electronics and maintenance
Most teachers are unfamiliar with generative AI: 2 out of 3 teachers (65%) do not use generative AI, including 1 in 10 teachers (9%) who do not know these tools at all.
A (too) large number of students consider it acceptable to have their work written by ChatGPT: more than 1 in 4 students (28%) consider it acceptable to write paragraphs of their assignment for them using AI.
93% of teachers and 79% of students believe that measures should be put in place to regulate the use of text-generating AI in education.
It is becoming essential to effectively recognise texts written by a human and those generated by artificial intelligence.
"Not being able to differentiate between what is produced by the student and what comes from the AI, for assessments in particular."
Teacher - 35-44 years old - Health and social
"When you spend a day doing the work normally with a search engine, comparing sources, etc... and your classmate folds it into 1 hour with chatGPT, it's pretty depressing. Especially when he gets a higher mark, why bother ethically?"
Student - 18-21 years old - Engineering
AI, a way of boosting grades: 63% of teachers think that AI enables students to get better grades and almost half (47%) of AI-using students say that they get better grade thanks to its use.
Since September 2023, Compilatio has been offering a new service: Compilatio Magister+. It enables lecturers to measure the amount of suspect texts in student work. The system uses artificial intelligence, which is itself trained to recognise the characteristics of texts generated by AIs such as ChatGPT. "Human" and "AI" texts are identified with 90% reliability.
Thanks to the software, the teacher can identify the passages on which there is doubt, and question the students to confirm whether or not they have mastered their subject.
Using this software ensures that all students are treated equally during the assessment process. Its use has the effect of making students more responsible and encouraging ethical behaviour. Compilatio continues to support schools in this approach to authenticity, with the new challenges of AI.
To verify the claims made by students in this survey, Compilatio randomly analysed 1,000 student documents submitted to Compilatio software between April and July 2023. The aim was to determine how many of these documents contained text generated by artificial intelligence. The results confirm the students' statements. 53% of the documents contained AI-generated text, which is very much in line with the 55% of students who said they occasionally use generative AI tools.
- Access to the full results using the interactive Le Sphinx platform (in French) : https://compilatio.link/ia-enquete-enseignement-2023
Use the buttons at the bottom of the page to navigate between questions.
- Two commented analyses of the results: Compilatio article and Sphinx Article (both in French).
Lucile Guillermin - Marketing Manager
Compilatio has been specialising in authenticity enhancement and plagiarism prevention since 2005. Present in forty countries, Compilatio equips more than 800 educational establishments with its software for detecting similarities and AI-generated texts. Compilatio helps educational establishments to implement and optimise their anti-plagiarism approach.
