A new study titled “Generative AI use and misuse call for assessment reform in higher education has highlighted growing use of generative artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT or any other models to produce text, video or code.
“Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT are becoming more common in academic settings,” the study reported. The study analysed responses from more than 95,000 undergraduate students across 20 major public research-intensive universities in the United States.
The study has used data from the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium, based at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley. SERU is a comprehensive census-based survey conducted between March and August 2024 across 20 major public research universities in the United States.
These institutions enroll over 2.6 million undergraduates and award more than half of all bachelor’s degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) nationwide.
According to the study 37.1 percent of students reported using generative AI tools almost monthly while 9.3 percent admitted to using it for cheating.
It further mentioned that students who said they never used AI generated tools during the academic year were excluded from the generative AI assisted cheating analysis, resulting in a final sample of approximately 61,509 students. The study also identified differences in the usage of generative AI tools among male and female students. Researchers found that 33 percent of female students reported using generative AI tools frequently as compared to 45 percent of males.
Study co-author René F. Kizilcec, associate professor of information science at the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and director of the Future of Learning Lab said the misuse of GenAI by students is a problem for assessment validity as well as for the credibility of university credentials.
Also Read: Study Reveals LLMs generated 150,000 Fake Citations in Research Papers
