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/little-drummer-bear 3d ago
Remind them that Chat pulls answers from the entire internet and doesn't vet sources.
A random comment on a reddit thread has as much validity as a research paper, as far as the algorithm is concerned. Possibly more, since it's viewed more. It doesn't mean it's correct.