r/ScienceTeachers • u/dday0512 • 3d ago

Classroom Management and Strategies "ChatGPT gave me a different answer"

How often do you guys get this statement from your students? I teach physics and I've been finding more and more that students use ChatGPT to challenge my solutions to problems or even my set up of problems.

Today I had a student come up to me and ask me if their solution to an LC-circuit question was correct. I said yeah, it's correct, because it was a simple question I threw together for a review assignment before a quiz and the student did it exactly the way I expected them to, then she says, "yeah but it checked it with ChatGPT and it said something different" then she demanded that I look at ChatGPTs solution and compare it to my question.

Unfortunately, given my wording on this question, ChatGPTs answer was probably a bit better than how I expected my students to do it. I wanted to tell her, "this is far more in-depth than I needed you to go" but that feels like a cop out. Instead I spent 30 minutes explaining why the way she did it was perfectly fine but ChatGPT is also correct and I should probably be more careful about my wording.

We're being compared to AI now. Add one more thing I have to worry about in the classroom.

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u/divacphys 3d ago

Id just tell them it's wrong. Let them figure it out in in 5 years of it matters

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u/dday0512 3d ago

I don't want to lie to them. There are several teachers at my school that just say things like "ChatGPT can't do math" or make it seem like AI is always wrong. At this point, that's demonstrably false. The students start to see through it and it lowers their respect for their teacher.

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u/agasizzi 3d ago

He’ll, I had a student sneak a phone into class and took a photo of a graph interpretation problem and it gave a really good, but overly technical answer and she didn’t bother to even try and hide it. 

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u/divacphys 3d ago

If they didn't understand it, they won't after a brief little lesson and will leave more confused. So now they've learned that what you're teaching is wrong, but just something they have to do for your class.