For now, there is no general blocking of ChatGPT in Portuguese universities. However, the tool that uses artificial intelligence to create texts from scratch has already been used fraudulently in higher education in Portugal. The professor who detected, in January, the use of this instrument in an exam doubts that preventing it will solve the danger of plagiarism, since “there are always ways to get around the blocks.”
A student of the Master’s Degree in Biomedical Engineering and Biophysics of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon used the GPT Chat to answer a question of an exam in the discipline “Medical Devices I”. The students took the test on the university’s computers and were able to consult the internet to write their answers, but the fact that the text was “too well written and very organized” made Professor Hugo Alexandre Ferreira suspicious.
The researcher explains that the evaluation “has a finite time”, so it is “very rare to find the chain of ideas very well structured, with perfect English”. Although the answer was not entirely correct, the teacher decided to do the cotton test and pasted the question he had asked in the exam in the ChatGPT.
TO TSFHugo Alexandre Ferreira says that what the artificial intelligence tool responded “was very close to what the student wrote, including the chain of ideas.”
The Lisbon University professor later confirmed “with software to detect ChatGPT text” that the student did in fact use that system to answer the exam question.
Hugo Alexandre Ferreira admits that he was surprised by the discovery of this fraud, because ChatGPT “is a technology that came out very recently.” However, the teacher points out that he did not punish the student “too much” for having taken this initiative. The student still had to retake the test.
“Careful attention, these things have already appeared here”
After this attempted plagiarism, Hugo Alexandre Ferreira alerted his fellow professors and the University of Lisbon itself. The case is seen by the teacher as “a sign of the times” that forces us to reflect on how to evaluate “in another way”.
For the researcher, the blocking of GPT Chat by universities does not solve the danger of fraud. The alternative is to “build a smarter solution” that easily detects plagiarism and uses artificial intelligence.
Regarding the student evaluation process, Hugo Alexandre Ferreira suggests that the most reliable tests can now be oral evaluations, since in this way “it is possible to see whether or not people understand the concepts they are supposed to master” .
The professor believes, however, that the technology idealized by the Californian start-up OpenAI has a silver lining, admitting that he uses ChatGPT in his own research.
“I do my research in the normal search engine, like google, and now I use ChatGPT to do a summary and then plug it in,” he says. The teacher explains that, in the end, he goes looking for the sources, since ChatGPT does not help where he got the information it provides.
With this acquired experience, the students of Hugo Alexandre Ferreira were also encouraged by the professor to use the tool, which, according to the professor, can speed up the investigation.
In France and the United States of America, ChatGPT has already been blocked at several universities. TO TSF He tried a reaction from the Council of Rectors of Portuguese Universities and the Coordinating Council of Higher Polytechnic Institutes, but received no response.
Source: TSF
