English Department Crackdown on ChatGPT

For those starting the school year thinking they can game the English system with chatGPT, don’t even bother. The English department’s new procedure for preemptively preventing, detecting and catching attempts at AI-based plagiarism is comprehensive and airtight. First, “[the department’s] strategies revolve around drafts…and their editorial process,” says Head of the English Department Jecca Hutcheson. Essay outlines and topic sentences are typically submitted during the start of the essay-writing process and kept on file in Google Classroom. An essay will “flag” if it changes significantly from its outline and first-draft topic sentences, and will then be subject to further scrutiny from software like GPTZero and Google Classroom’s built-in plagiarism checker. Furthermore, the department plans to make use of the longer class blocks allotted in the new schedule to supervise student work; Jecca is hopeful that “supervised [work]...[will be] less likely to be assisted by any source, whether human or machine”. Finally, while the version history of a Google Doc has always been used by Middlesex faculty to verify the progress of an essay, teachers will examine version histories in greater detail going forward to combat the use of generative AI. Specifically, large swathes of text appearing in relatively short periods of time on a version history will “flag”, similar to an essay that changes too much from conception to publication. Finally, the faculty of the English department have become familiar with the sentence construction, argumentative logic and style of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT - which differ significantly from the “individualized and idiosyncratic” styles of writing that Middlesex teaches. While an accurate schoolwide statistic on the prevalence of plagiarism would be impossible to obtain, the English Department states that it detects around ten cases of plagiarism annually, with varying degrees of severity.

Even with all these measures in place, is it possible to game the system? Probably. Nothing stops someone from ChatGPT-ing an essay outline to go along with your generated essay, although it's likely that ChatGPT will produce below-average work. SparkNotes and LitCharts and the countless websites like them remain easily accessible. Also, barring all these options, one could always ask somebody else to write an essay in their name.

However, it’s not so much about the endless arms race between plagiarists and educators, which will unfortunately always result in a win for plagiarists, and more so what the accessibility of what Jecca calls “reductive” tools will do to the students of this generation. Representing the rest of the department, Jecca states that “we expect that our students value their own voices, and that they believe that learning to write will only become a more valuable asset…If many people rely on [generative] AI, then the idiosyncratic, individual voice [taught at Middlesex] will only gain in value.” Furthermore, she states that “the process of writing is a critical component of developing as an independent thinker.” Thus, submitting an auto-generated essay for a grade not only subverts institutional Middlesex values but also sabotages one’s own intellectual development. So the question becomes this: even if you could, is it really worth it?

Luke Zhang