Copilot

So far, I had been using ChatGPT4 to run my assignments through. I knew that the next generation of AI does better, but you have to pay for that. I was hoping at some point, the university would just get itself a subscription. I was not keen to pay myself for something I only need for work.

There was no such subscription forthcoming. But what was forthcoming was Copilot. It’s free, and provided by Microsoft. I decided to give it a go. I had so far focussed changing text only questions to make them less AI-able, but Copilot can read in images as well. So I read in a hand-sketched graph with two mass balance gradients of a hypothetical glacier, and asked the software what could have happened to make the glacier go from the one state into the other. And it have a fine answer. Oh dear.

Copilot tries an old exam question

 

I will have to not only pull exam questions through Copilot, but also all other assignments. And everything it can do will have to be changed, which will be a lot. 

We totally can ask things of the students AI still can’t do. But it will have to rely on their skills in critical appraisal and creative thinking and suchlike. Unfortunately, these tend to be things students are on average not keen on. They tend to prefer being railroaded. But anything railroaded can be done with AI. Higher education might be getting harder as we speak! Especially for the students who would struggle anyway. The really good ones will thrive as never before, as they will have unprecedentedly powerful tools at their disposal, but well, by definition, most will be near the middle of the bell curve…