The Risk of Using ChatGPT for College Essay Writing

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Introduction

It is not a secret that everyone has seen the rise of technological tools in the academic writing workflow. This set of tools includes ChatGPT disguised as a helping hand for students but in reality, it is one of the bad choices for students. The fact that using such tools brings negative value to the student’s education uncovers its academic downside. Therefore, a professional essay writer prohibits its usage for writing an essay, making students aware of the drawbacks it offers.

It is factually right that this tool was brought to life by the company whose CEO Sam Altman stated that “ChatGPT is incredibly limited but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness. It’s a mistake to rely on it for anything important right now. It’s a preview of progress, we have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.” this way it highlights that it is not fully compatible and trustworthy when collecting reliable information.

Apart from that, an American educational news website The Chronicles of Higher Education, directed a survey in which educators showed worry that using AI-produced writing reduces students’ thinking ability. Hence, students must avoid using it for all forms of academic writing to improve their university scores. The dichotomy of the situation is that instead of improving student’s learning it hurts their career, which sometimes results in scholarly failure. This leads to the question of how it negatively affects students' careers. Let's find the answer below:

The Ways ChatGPT Harms Student’s Educational Pursuit Include

It can’t be neglected that students are often misguided in their educational careers regarding what is right or wrong. This mainly happens because of their unawareness, limited knowledge, inability to analyse, and naive nature. Thus, it is seen that students indulge in wrong practices without even realising the adverse effects. This way, students find themselves at a place where it becomes hard for them to come back. Therefore, students must understand the harm such AI tools bring for them to tackle them at the initial stages, these negative effects are discussed below providing a better understanding:

1. Causes Guideline’s Offence

It is visible to the essay instructors that students use unethical AI tools to complete their essays, which contradicts the main objective of conducting essay writing assessments. Thus, the University of California applied a guideline labelled Policy on Academic Integrity and AI Tool against using such tools, which consider AI-prepared content a work of dishonesty. Additionally, a survey of Inside Higher Ed stated that 56% of surveyed educators use efficient technological software Turnitin to detect any ChatGPT essay. This is mainly because Turnitin has recently developed its specialised software to identify AI and plagiarise content in the essay to provide a fair writing evaluation. The fact that Turnitin offers powerful AI software that precisely detects such content from the writing justifies its wide usage in universities by educators. Hence, it can be stated that the unparalleled services from Turnitin software contribute to identifying students violating academic rubrics, resulting in severe unwanted results for students submitting AI writing.

2. Failing College Submission

It is found that with the introduction of advanced detection tools, it has become easy to detect lengthy essays faster within minutes. The fact that without using the latest detection tools takes educators forever to assess an essay reflects the hardships in the process and sometimes offers students the benefit of the doubt. However, with Turnitin, it has become almost impossible for students to escape the assessment by having AI content in the essays. In this context, one newspaper named The Guardian has mentioned that Turnitin identifies AI writing with 95% accuracy, making cheating with ChatGPT easily detectable. In this matter, the chief product officer of Turnitin, Annie Chechitelli once said “Our model is trained specifically on essay writing sources from a comprehensive database, as opposed to solely publicly available content. As a result, Turnitin is more turned to finding instances of potential dishonesty in students' assignments.”, this means the original quality content is the priority of the essay. Hence, it can be said that failing the benchmark can steer students to their essay elimination.

3. Might Suffer Legal Aftermath

It is right that students may ignore university instructions for machine-copied content and plagiarism, risking their university performance. However, in 2023 multiple esteemed institutions like Harvard have developed some tough policies against ChatGPT allowing them to take legal action against students if they cross the guidelines, which can also lead to college expulsion. The fact that the CEO of Turnitin Chris Caren openly support educators to sustain integrity in academic writing through their services says much about the worth of the originality of written essays. Therefore, students must keep the legal consequences of availing of such AI tools, which indicates it is strictly avoided. Hence, it is right to say that students should incorporate the practice of writing their essays themselves to avoid committing such legal offences.

4. Limits the Feedback Improvement

It can’t be denied that colleges include multiple essays in a student’s syllabus to test and expand their knowledge. However, using AI tools to create whole essays does the opposite and limits the student’s improvement in the absence of well-aligned feedback. It is a fact that human learns through their mistakes but using AI tools for writing leaves no space for mistakes and learning through feedback as it becomes tough to assess artificial writing. This means that the whole purpose of learning through essay writing goes to disdain with the incorporation of technological advancements. Therefore, the famous artificial intelligence researcher and author Gary Marcus said “These large language models are very good at generating text but are fundamentally flawed. They do not understand the content, they just predict the next word based on probabilities.", this strengthens the fact that AI content lacks the accuracy and thus students gain invaluable writing through it. Hence, it is a fair assessment for students to leave the hands of such tools to continue learning by making mistakes and grasping feedback.

5. Creates Low-Quality One-Dimensional Essays

It is correct that students most of the time doubt their ability thinking that the AI content generation tool provides premium quality work based on their huge dataset. However, the reality is that these AI tools usually don’t have human emotions such as empathy and more, and this is why their essays lack depth. The various AI models can not provide human-like essays which examine the information based on their cognitive thinking skills. In these aspects, experts in Turnitin surveyed in 2024 on AI and the Erosion of Academic Rigor which shows that 60% of AI-created writing lacks original thoughts and only contains general statements without any depth.

Therefore, using ChatGPT prepares low-quality one-dimensional essays that only focus on descriptive writing, offering lowered academic marks to students. This is why professional dissertation help services include refraining from AI writing in their guidance to prevent students from falling under academic violation and ruining their academic honesty. Hence, it can be said that to avoid low-quality submission of essays students must stay away from AI writing.

6. Chances of Inaccurate and Plagiarised Content

It is right that colleges have multiple guidelines apart from restricting AI content which include the essay originality. However, it can’t be neglected that using AI for writing can significantly increase the chances of plagiarism as it uses a large dataset making it challenging for students to track the sources. This way educators can proficiently detect plagiarised content using Turnitin, leaving no room for plagiarism and AI inside the content. It is seen that recently in 2024 the US has presented an ‘AI Accountability Act’ which fines universities and stops government funding if they fall short in enforcing academic ethics for the fair use of AI. The fact that various prestigious institutes such as the University of Edinburgh, Queen Mary University of London, and multiple others have stated that using chatbots for university academic assessment falls under AI-constructed content represents the significance of the matter.

Apart from that, the data fed to such AI writing software can not be updated daily and thus the chances of gaining outdated data are high. Therefore, with inaccuracy and plagiarism in essays, students can't make academic progress which can affect their path of education. Hence, it can fairly be said that students can easily dodge inaccuracy and plagiarism in their essays by keeping themselves away from such mediums.

7. Suffer Over-dependence on Technology

It is known that overusing resources can have negative impacts, especially when we talk about it in the field of academics. The fact that students prepare essays with assistance from such AI platforms at every stage from researching to editing reflects their high reliance on technology. This way students form an over-dependence on technology which suffers them in multiple aspects. A study published by Turitin showcased that among surveyed students, 30% admitted using such tools for their academic projects. This highlights that students are indeed getting overly dependent on this technology, which reduces their knowledge, analysing skills, cognitive ability, and much more. Therefore, students must avoid relying on technology as it forms a bad habit of always looking for help which hurts them in the long run. Hence, it is right to say that depending too much on technology can cause academic suffering for students.

Conclusion

It is observed that easy writing involves multiple aspects which sometimes gets challenging to handle for students. However, these hurdles can be crossed easily by spending some time in the process, but students get impatience and follow the wrong way of using AI writing tools. This way they may complete the work but that work is of no value as it provides numerous drawbacks. Some of the drawbacks it offers include violating academic guidelines, facing the university and legal penalties, restricting creativity, offering low-quality and plagiarised essays, and minimising student’s writing growth. Hence, it is right to say avoiding such tools is a must for students if they wish to submit their essays smoothly and score well in college.

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