New Delhi: A computer science teacher of St Mary’s School in Safdarjung Enclave, New Delhi, recently received a coding assignment that she suspected had been executed using ChatGPT. She confronted the student. He insisted that it was his work and that his brother had polished the code, but denied using any AI tool. She then asked him to explain the command and provide another use case to implement it. The student failed to do this.
“I know my students. I know the level of understanding that every child has. If a child is really going beyond and coming up with something really extraordinary, I have to decide if this is the capability of the child or, this is AI-generated,” she told ThePrint on the condition of anonymity.
What started as a moral and pedagogical panic in the education world a couple of years ago has now descended into institutional apathy. Schools in the country are no longer dreading the rampant use of ChatGPT or other Large Language Models (LLMs) in the classrooms. Teachers are using AI tools to curate the assignments and worksheets. Students are using the tools to solve those assignments and worksheets.
The use of AI tools is prolific among school students and teachers now. There is even a quiet realisation that this is uncontrollable. And the majority of Indian schools are yet to evolve guidelines for evaluation and usage. But a few are holding training sessions for teachers to adapt the tools and reduce their grunt work.
“Every single student I know uses ChatGPT. They have it on their phone, or if not, they use it on their systems,” said Sachin Paranjape, a former fellow at Teach for India.
Some educators are echoing the need for guidelines from the government to ensure educators are abreast with developments, and on top of the right ways to use the tools.
“We are governed by two authorities—the Department of Education and the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). If there are certain broad guidelines, we will be in a better position to use it in a responsible way. These guidelines should focus on how to use AI in an ethical way so we can guide our teachers and students accordingly,” said Dr Jyoti Arora, Principal of Mount Abu Public School, Rohini, and a governing body member of the CBSE.
Students are using AI tools for nearly all aspects of their academic life—doing homework, assignments, creating PPTs, ideating for projects, getting clarity on difficult concepts where teachers may not have the time to explain, and learning alternative ways to solve problems.
“For our holiday homework, my bench partner used ChatGPT to prepare the history of warriors. She copied the answer word-to-word. She used difficult words that were very difficult. The teacher found out and asked her the meaning of those words, which she did not know,” said Prachi, a Class 8 student at a CBSE school in Ghaziabad, giggling.
So far, the government has not issued any official policy guidelines for the use of AI tools in schools. There have been, however, initial discussions with the Wadhwani AI, an independent non-profit institute established in 2018, with headquarters in New Delhi, to modify the tools for Indian classrooms.
A few days ago, reading student entries received for the vigilance week observed by CBSE, Arora found herself questioning if the entries were truly done by students, given the quality of responses.
Yet other principals have found resources online for helping their teachers. Speaking to ThePrint, Swati Popat Vats, renowned educationist and President of the Podar Education Network, talked about the recent resources she had stumbled upon, an AI for All course, a collaboration between the Ministry of Education and Intel.
“I think they are doing their bit in helping us understand. They are putting disclaimers. They are not publicising it as much. When they launch these things, they need to include the media to highlight.” she said.
A silent change
The job of a teacher in the classroom for nearly all of the schooling system’s history was to check whether the students were producing the right answers, as in science or math, or quality answers in subjects like English. This role has now pivoted to screening whether those answers have been produced by the student or an AI tool, a change quite unprecedented for teachers.
“I gave a science worksheet to my students here. It is absolutely possible to simply screenshot and upload this to ChatGPT, and get all the answers, and I am sure many of the students do it. I have no way to know whether they actually understood the concept, or not,” said Dr Preeti Singh, a retired college professor who now takes tuition classes for students from Classes 5 to 9 in Ghaziabad. She is frustrated with the ‘misuse’ of the tools by students.
When the teachers did finally get around to learning to spot the answers, assignments and suggestions that were AI-generated, there came another breakthrough. Students began using ‘humanisers’—tools that convert content from models like ChatGPT, Bard, Gemini, and others to natural human-like text, making it very hard to distinguish from human writing.
“Now it’s a matter of how good you are at coming up with the right prompts and tweaking them. In some ways, things are more competitive now because everyone can use these tools,” said Anvi, a Class 11 student from Oberoi International School, Mumbai, who has been using ChatGPT for over a year.
Meanwhile, teachers too can use AI tools in multiple ways—creating assignments, coming up with ideas for class activities, writing recommendation letters, or letters to parents, and explaining the academic grades for the child, among other things. While teachers are catching up with the developments themselves, some schools have introduced training to help teachers learn to use the models more effectively for teaching.
“Teachers have taken workshops about new tools that we could use. There is gamma AI for presentations. Of course, ChatGPT has always been there. Using ChatGPT, they can just upload the data, upload any document or a PDF, and generate a quiz from there, and generate questions, and give answers. It’s a lot easier for the teachers because we need to produce so many worksheets.” remarked Nikhil, a teacher at St Mary’s School in Safdarjung Enclave in a meeting along with the principal.
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Acceptance of the inevitable
As schools move toward the total and inevitable acceptance of the use of AI in classrooms, some more reluctantly than others, a few teachers are seeing their roles going beyond what was traditionally expected of them. They feel there is a need to inculcate academic honesty, integrity where students do not call the work done by AI their own. There are conversations around teaching children the right values. How best to do that is the question they have yet to address.
“How do you define what is the right way to use it? What is the ethical way to use it? Because it is so rapidly expanding. What we have to appreciate is that this is a bullet which has left the gun already. We can posture all we like, but are living in uncertain times,” said Saurav Sinha, the Principal of Mayo College in Ajmer.
Teachers are calling for parents to take a larger role, to keep a check on their children, and put limits on the use of devices, thereby reducing the use of AI tools for homework. Parents, for their part, are raising concerns regarding homework and assignments being sent digitally, their children’s overreliance on the AI tools, and the subsequent dip in grades.
“My son’s grades have fallen dramatically. He used to be an 80 per cent student. Now, before every exam cycle, he falls ill. Since he has made no effort to learn because he has been using ChatGPT to finish all his homework, he is afraid of exams. He is now scoring less than 50 per cent,” said Manju, the mother of a Class 7 student studying at a school in Dwarka.
Priyanka Mehta is an alumna of ThePrint School of Journalism.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)