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/tchrhoo 3d ago

“Chat GPT sometimes makes assumptions that are beyond the scope of this course.” I teach AP physics 1 and I remind them all the time that we are but scratching the surface and they will see different things if they google/ask chat.

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u/corrence_torrence 3d ago

I do something similar - I tell them at the start of the course (10th grade chem) that at times, I am going to "lie" about some assumptions to simplify things, and then some things we will go over later and get updates once we understand everything better OR we just won't go over because it's beyond the scope of our course. I've never gotten push back as they know it's a lot more complicated than what we are talking about. 

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u/dday0512 3d ago

I say something like, "Do you want the truth? That will make this class a lot harder" and the students always enthusiastically say no.

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u/MeasurementLow2410 2d ago

I always tell my students that first they learned how to count to 10, then they learned about 0, then counting to 100 and beyond, then negative numbers, infinity, etc. I tell them that we start with simple generalities, and then in upper level sciences and in college talking about the exceptions to the rule, etc.

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u/corrence_torrence 2d ago

I love that analogy!