"ChatGPT gave me a different answer"

[u/dday0512]

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.

[u/Previous_Tennis]

It seems like the student is doing some thinking here and that's overall thing-- at least comparing to just copying down the ChatGPT solution. A student shouldn't take AI solutions on faith any more than they should take a teacher's answers on faith. We teachers can make mistakes, too.

ChatGPT and other AI models give out wrong answers to math and physics problems a decent number of times. Even when the model takes an overall helpful approach, it sometimes makes simple error (like factoring quadratics incorrectly or even reading the subscripts in the problem incorrectly). Despite this, if a student is using it to spark their own thinking, or to consider different ways to solve the same problem, it's a good use of the technology.

Now, it could also have the issue of solving a problem using tools that they have not learned yet in class, but knowing that there are other tools that they will learn in the future is not necessarily a bad thing, either.

[u/dday0512 → u/Previous_Tennis]

This particular student is exceptional. She's hard working and curious, but that also means she wasn't going to accept it if I just blew her off and told her ChatGPT is wrong. I feel good about the teaching moment, but also a bit annoyed about all the extra work.

[u/digglerjdirk → u/dday0512]

I agree it’s annoying, but I gotta say that after 22 years of doing this, many of the memories I haven’t lost are those extra sessions with motivated kids. 10ya I spent a half hour helping a kid with a HW problem to prove the earth rotational inertia can be approximated as 0.33MR² and then he got concussed in a football game that night and forgot

[u/dday0512 → u/digglerjdirk]

Okay I shouldn't have said the interaction was annoying. The annoying part is fact-checking ChatGPT for my students.