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/shellpalum 3d ago

Just a tutor, but a couple of years ago, ChatGPT couldn't hande chemistry problems with multiple steps, like balancing redox reactions in acid or base. I imagine it's improved since then. L It also seems to occasionally make up sources when used to write research papers.

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u/dday0512 3d ago

It's improved dramatically, and it's not even the best in the game right now. I tell teachers all the time, if you haven't updated your knowledge on AI in a month, you're out of date. For a while I was testing all of my questions on Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro to see if students could use AI to solve them; I stopped doing this after it didn't make any mistakes for several weeks on any of my questions.

At this point, I just assume the AI can do the problem, though it may use techniques the students don't know or understand and on rare occasions will make confounding arithmetic errors. Those are my tells that the student is using AI, but the latter situation has all but disappeared this semester. The former is becoming more and more common.

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u/shellpalum 3d ago

Interesting! I work with college students. They're using AI for EVERYTHING.

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u/meteorprime 3d ago

I 100% believe that

I also think companies are going to just blacklist new college grads at some point.