2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Student Use of Artificial Intelligence to Write Technical Engineering Papers – Cheating or a Tool to Augment Learning

Presented at Engineering Ethics Division (ETHICS) Technical Session_Monday June 26, 3:15 - 4:45

Considerable concern has emerged over the potential use of AI tools by students for completing assignments in their classes. Reactions in academia have been mixed, with some describing such use of AI tools as “cheating” while others compare it to the use of calculators and see it as the impetus for enabling deeper learning by students. To analyze some of these issues, the recently released AI tool ChatGPT was used to respond to actual Discussion Board questions in our online cybersecurity classes. ChatGPT was also asked to write a Python program to develop a backpropagation Neural Network for XOR. The results were excellent, both for answering the Discussion Board Questions and for writing code. Four findings emerged from this effort: 1) ChatGPT does an exceptional job of answering questions and generating code, 2) it is not clear how student submissions generated with AI should be graded, 3) along with the AI tools themselves, tools have been developed that can detect whether AI was used to generate a student submission but with a high rate of false positives, and 4) despite these three findings, students could and should be encouraged to collaborate with AI tools, similar to the way they would collaborate with other students. These results led to four conclusions: 1) ethically, the use of tools such as ChatGPT without acknowledging that they have been used is cheating, 2) it will be impossible to stop students from using tools like ChatGPT, but unacknowledged use can be detected, albeit with a very high percentage of false positives, 3) use of AI tools should be encouraged rather than discouraged, and 4) higher education should focus on new methods and mechanisms for assessing student learning that take advantage of the AI tools.

Authors

Dr. Ronald P. Uhlig National University [biography]

From 2010-2014, Dr. Ronald P. Uhlig was Dean, School of Business and Management, National University, La Jolla, CA. He returned to the engineering faculty in 2014 and is currently Chair, Department of Engineering, School of Technology and Engineering. During 2005-2010 he served in multiple positions including Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, and Academic Program Director for the Master of Science in Wireless Communications; as well as Principal Investigator for two HP Technology for Teaching grants. From 2000-2005, he was President/CEO, SegWave, Inc., an educational technology systems company he founded.

Previous positions include Vice President for Russia and Eastern Europe, Qualcomm Inc., 1995-99, with offices in San Diego and Moscow, Russia and multiple positions with Northern Telecom and Bell-Northern Research in Ottawa, Canada and Richardson, TX during 1978-1995, including Director, Intelligent Network Solutions and Director, Asia/Pacific Strategic Marketing. He is one of several “Fathers of email”, based on work he did with the US Army and DARPA in the 1970s and several international committees he chaired during 1979-91. Those committees took him to nearly 100 countries globally. He had nationwide responsibility for US Army Materiel Command Scientific and Engineering computing, 1969-78, pioneering many applications in what has become today’s Internet, and he served as a US Army Officer in the Office of the Chief of Staff, in the Pentagon, 1966-1968.

He holds a B.Sc. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Maryland. He is the recipient of a Gold Medal from the International Telecommunications Academy for sustained contributions to telecommunications; the Silver Core from the International Federation for Information Processing; and the Founders Award from the International Council for Computer Communications. He has served as a member of the Steering Committee for Project Inkwell.
Dr. Shatha Jawad Jawad National University [biography]

Dr. Shatha Jawad has more than 22 years of experience in teaching and more than three years as a software engineer. She had UNESCO Fellowship in the field of Information and Communication Technologies, in 2002. Her Ph.D. is in computer engineering. She is a member of the Institute for Learning-enabled Optimization at Scale (TILOS) which has an NSF grant that began on November 1, 2021, for five years. TILOS is a National Science Foundation-funded Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Institute led by the University of California-San Diego and includes faculty from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Texas at Austin, Yale University, and the National University.
Dr. Bhaskar Sinha National University [biography]

Dr. Bhaskar Sinha is a Professor in the School of Engineering and Computing at National University in San Diego, California.
Dr. Pradip Peter Dey [biography]

Dr. Pradip Peter Dey has more than 20 years of experience in Computer Science research and education. His university teaching and professional experience emphasizes mathematical modeling, information extraction, syntax and semantics of natural language, w
Dr. Mohammad N. Amin National University [biography]

Mohammad Amin received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering & Computer Engineering, and M.S. degree in Solid State Physics from Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He also received M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees in Physics from Dacca University. Currently, he is working as a Professor of Engineering at the National University, San Diego, California. He received the President Disguised Teaching Award in 2020 and two times President Professoriate Awards. He published and presented 100+ technical papers in the peer reviewed journal and conference proceedings. He edited nine conference proceedings, chaired nine conferences including 2009 ASEE/PSW and 2015 ASEE/PSW and three US Patents.

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