2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The purpose of this practice paper is to highlight the role of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT in increasing equitable access to education in classrooms. Over the past few years, the development and proliferation of generative AI tools like ChatGPT at every level of Internet users has also found its way into educational contexts. High schools, colleges and universities are being faced with navigating the challenges that ChatGPT usage brings in the educational context. Most arguments in this space have been that using ChatGPT for coursework veers dangerously close to academic dishonesty and bring up questions about plagiarism whereby students would use it to write their essays and writing assignments for them, resulting in policies being instituted by instructors to ban ChatGPT usage in their classrooms or set up affordances to detect ChatGPT-produced writing in assignments.

While we recognize the merits of this argument and other research in the field on the Western-centric approaches it takes, as well as the harms it causes and negative biases and stereotypes it propagates, we present an argument in this paper that ChatGPT is an important tool for creating equitable access, especially for international students or students with traditionally marginalized identities in engineering education. We present this from the positionalities of student educators in engineering courses with reading and writing components and as international students in the US having relied on machine translation in their own student experiences. We draw upon epistemic experiences of instances where students used affordances of ChatGPT such as content comprehension and summarization, synthesizing a set of titles into generating paper outlines, using machine translation to translate English readings into other languages that they are more comfortable in, and many others. We conclude with recommendations on framing the conversation around ChatGPT usage in classes, ensuring students do not violate academic integrity while also having equitable access to course content.