The AI revolution already transforming education

When Lauren started researching the British designer Yinka Ilori for a school project earlier this year, she was able to consult her new study pal: artificial intelligence.

After an hour of scouring Google for information, the 16-year-old pupil asked an AI tool called ChatGPT, in which you input a question and get a generated answer, to write a paragraph about Ilori. It replied with fascinating details about the artist’s life that were new and — she later confirmed — factually correct.

“Some of the things it brought up I hadn’t found anywhere online,” says Lauren, a pupil at Wimbledon High School, a private girl’s school in south London. “I was actually surprised about how it was able to give me information that wasn’t widely available, and a different perspective.”

Since ChatGPT — a powerful, freely available AI software capable of writing sophisticated responses to prompts — arrived on the scene last year, it has prompted intense speculation about the long-term repercussions on a host of industries and activities.

But nowhere has the impact been felt more immediately than in education. Overnight, rather than labour through traditional exercises designed to develop and assess learning, students could simply instruct a computer to compose essays, answer maths questions or quickly perform complex coursework assignments and pass the results off as their own.

As a result, schools and universities have been forced into a fundamental rethink of how they conduct both tuition and academic testing.

Worries about AI-based plagiarism have pushed a number of institutions to opt for an outright ban of bots like ChatGPT. But enforcing this is difficult, because detecting when the technology has been used is so far unreliable.

An example of what ChatGPT says when asked about a prominent British designer

An example of what ChatGPT says when asked about a prominent British designer

Given how pervasive the technology already is, some educators are instead moving in the opposite direction and cautiously experimenting with ways to use generative AI to enhance their lessons.

Many students are keen for them to take this approach. For Lauren and her friends, months of playing around with ChatGPT have convinced them there is more to be gained from generative AI than simply cheating. And with the technology threatening to overhaul the jobs market and become a permanent communication tool in everyday lives, they are anxious to be prepared for the turbulence to come.

But these experiments raise the question of whether it is possible to open the door to AI in education without undercutting the most important features of human learning — about what it actually means to be numerate and to be literate.

“We don’t yet understand what generative AI is going to do to our world,” says Conrad Wolfram, the European co-founder of AI-driven research platform Wolfram, who has long pushed for an overhaul of the way maths is taught. “So it’s hard to work out yet how it should affect the content of education.”

When ChatGPT was launched by San Francisco-based tech company OpenAI in November 2022, the 300-odd-person team, backed by Microsoft, was expecting it to be a small-scale experiment that would help them build better AI systems in the future. What happened next left them stunned.

Within weeks, ChatGPT, a tool based on software known as a large language model, was being used by more than 100mn people globally. Now, it is being tested inside law firms, management consultancies, news publishers, financial institutions, governments and schools, for mental health therapy and legal advice, to write code, essays and contracts, summarise complex documents, and run online businesses.

For lecturers at the University of Cambridge, the timing of ChatGPT’s launch — as students headed home for Christmas holidays — was convenient.

“We were able to take stock,” says Professor Bhaskar Vira, the university’s pro-vice-chancellor for education. In the discussions that followed, teaching staff observed as other universities took action on ChatGPT, in some cases banning the technology, in others offering students guidance.

By the time students returned, the university had decided a ban would be futile. “We understood it wasn’t feasible,” Vira says. Instead, the university sought to establish fair use guidelines. “We need to have boundaries so they have a very clear idea of what is permitted and not permitted.”

Their exam was correct. A survey by Cambridge student newspaper Varsity last month found almost half of all students have used ChatGPT to complete their studies. One-fifth used it in work that contributed to their degree and 7 per cent planned to use it in exams. It was the equivalent, said one student, of “dropping one of your cleverer mates a message” asking for help.

Ayushman Nath, a 19-year-old engineering student at Cambridge’s Churchill College, discovered ChatGPT on TikTok like many of his peers. At first, people were posting funny videos of the chatbot telling jokes, but then slowly there was a shift.

Nowadays, Nath says it is common for students to paste in long articles or academic papers and ask for summaries, or to brainstorm ideas on a broad topic. He has used it to research a report on batteries for electric cars, for example. “You can’t use it to replace fundamental knowledge from scientific papers. But it’s really useful for quickly developing a high-level understanding of a complex topic, and coming up with ideas worth exploring,” he says.

However, Nath quickly learned that you cannot trust it to be 100 per cent accurate: “I remember it gave me some stats about electric vehicle batteries, and when I asked for citations, it told me it made them up.”

An example of how ChatGPT describes EV batteries

An example of how ChatGPT describes EV batteries

Accuracy is one of the major challenges with generative AI. Language models are known to “hallucinate”, which means they fabricate facts, sources and citations in unpredictable ways as undergraduate Nath discovered.

There is also evidence of bias in AI-written text, including sexism, racism and political partisanship, learned from the corpus of internet data, including social media platforms like Reddit and YouTube, that companies have used to train their systems.

Underpinning this is the “black box” effect, which means it is not clear how AI comes to its conclusions. “It can give you false information . . . it’s a vacuum that sucks a bunch of content off the internet and reframes it,” says Jonathan Jones, a history lecturer at the Virginia Military Institute. “We found a lot more myth and memory than hard truths.”

Earlier this year at the Institut auf dem Rosenberg, one of Switzerland’s most elite boarding schools, 12th-grade student Karolina was working on an assignment for her sociolinguistics class. The project was on regional accents in Britain and its effects on people’s social standing and job prospects.

What she handed in was not an essay but a video, featuring an analytical dialogue on the subject between two women in the relevant accents. The script was based on Karolina’s own research. The women were not real: they were avatars generated by Colossyan Creator, AI software from a London-based start-up. “I watched it and I was in awe,” says Anita Gademann, Rosenberg’s director and head of innovation. “It was so much more impactful in making the point.”

Gademann says the school has encouraged students’ use of AI tools, following other qualification bodies including the International Baccalaureate and Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania’s business school. “There is no going back,” she says. “Children are using tech to study and learn, with or without AI.”

Over the past year, the school has observed that students’ assignments have become a lot more visual. Alongside written work, students regularly submit images or videos created by AI-powered art generators like Dall-E or Midjourney. The visuals themselves are a learning opportunity, says Gademann, citing a history class that evaluated anachronisms in AI-generated pictures of the Middle Ages, for instance.

Alongside written work, Rosenberg students regularly submit images or videos created by AI-powered art generators like Dall-E or Midjourney

There have been other successes: through repeated use, ChatGPT has improved the writing standard of students who previously struggled. “They are thinkers, they are intelligent, they can analyse, but [putting] something on paper, it’s hard,” Gademann says.

At Rosenberg, roughly 30 per cent of grades are already earned through debate and presentations. Gademann says the advent of generative AI has made it clear that standardised testing models have to change: “If a machine can answer a question, we shouldn’t be asking a human being to answer this same question.”

This overarching dilemma — to what extent exams should be reshaped for AI — has become a pertinent one. Despite their problems, large language models can already produce university-level essays, and easily pass standardised tests such as the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) and the Graduate Record Exams (GRE), required for graduate school, as well as the US Medical Licensing Exam.

The software even received a B grade on a core Wharton School MBA course, prompting business school deans across the world to convene emergency faculty meetings on their future.

Earlier this year, Wolfram, the AI pioneer, twinned ChatGPT with a plug in called WolframAlpha, and asked it to sit the maths A-level, England’s standard mathematics qualification for 18-year-olds. The answer engine achieved 96 per cent.

For Wolfram, this was further proof that maths education in the UK, where he is based, is hopelessly behind technological advances, forcing children to spend years learning longhand sums that can be easily done by computers.

Instead, Wolfram argues schools should be teaching “computational literacy”, learning how to solve tricky problems by asking computers complex questions and allowing them to do tedious calculations. This means students can step up “to the next level”, he says, and spend time using more human capabilities, such as being creative or thinking strategically.

Teaching young people to enjoy knowledge, rather than rote learn it, will better prepare children for a future world of work, Wolfram adds, predicting that menial jobs will be automated, while humans take on a higher-skilled supervisory role. “The vocational is the conceptual.”

While AI tools are being rapidly implemented by students, and even integrated into the curriculum at some schools such as Rosenberg, the risks and limitations of the software remain clear.

A coalition of state and private schools in the UK are so concerned about the speed at which AI is developing, they are setting up a cross-sector body to advise “bewildered” educators on how best to use the technology. In a letter to The Times, the group also said they have “no confidence” that large digital companies are capable of regulating themselves.

Anna Mills, a writing instructor at the College of Marin, a community college in California, has spent a year testing language models, the technology underlying ChatGPT, such as OpenAI’s most advanced model GPT-4. Her main concern is that automating young people’s day-to-day lessons by allowing AI to do the legwork could lead to “learning loss”, a decline in essential literacy and numeracy skills.

At Wimbledon High School, where the use of AI is led by Rachel Evans, its director of digital learning and innovation, Lauren’s classmate Olivia has enjoyed using ChatGPT as a “creative spark” but is worried this risks eroding her own abilities. “When you actually want to start that yourself . . . it’s going to be really challenging if you haven’t had that practice.”

Her friend Rada is less worried. She has found ChatGPT unreliable for giving answers, but useful for helping to structure her arguments. “It’s not good at answers, but it’s good at ‘flufferising’ them,” she says, referring to the chatbot’s ability to turn rough ideas into something more digestible.

Mills agrees that AI-produced essays are often articulate and well-structured, but they can lack originality and ideas. That, she says, should force educators to interrogate what students should get from essay tasks. “We assign writing because we think it helps people learn to think. Not to create more student essays,” she adds. “It’s the mainstay process that academia has developed to help people think and communicate and get further in their understanding. We want students to engage in that.”

Senior leaders at the Harris Federation, which runs 52 state-funded primary and secondary schools in London, are excited about the potential for generative AI to help students with research as well as freeing up teachers’ time by generating lesson plans or marking work.

Yet the federation’s chief executive, Sir Dan Moynihan, is concerned the technology could present an “equity issue”. Not only may poorer students struggle to access paid-for AI technology that will make work easier, he says, schools with tight budgets may use AI to cut corners in a way that is not necessarily the best for learning.

“I’m not a pessimist, but we have to collectively avoid this becoming a dystopian thing,” says Moynihan. “We need to make sure we don’t end up with AI working with large numbers of kids [and] teachers acting as pastoral support, or maintaining discipline.”

However, there are those who point out that educators are only just beginning to think of ways it might be used in classrooms.

In September 2022, entrepreneur Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, a non-profit whose free online tutorials are viewed by millions of children globally, was approached by OpenAI to test out its new model GPT-4, which underpins the paid-for version of ChatGPT.

After Khan, who also runs a bricks-and-mortar private school in the heart of Silicon Valley, spent a weekend playing with it, he realised it was not just about producing answers: GPT-4 could provide rationales, prompt the student in a Socratic way and even write its own questions. “I always thought it would be 10-20 years before we could even hope to give every student an on-demand tutor,” says Khan. “But then I was like, wow, this could be months away.”

By March, a model from Khan’s team had gone from “almost nothing to a fairly compelling tutor”, called Khanmigo. Khan pays OpenAI a fee to cover the computational cost of running the AI system, roughly $9-$10 per month per user.

The AI tutor uses GPT-4 to debate with students, coach them on subjects ranging from physics and English, and answer questions as pupils complete tutorials. Asking the software to provide an explanation for its answers increases its accuracy and improves the lesson, he says. The product is being rolled out to hundreds of teachers and children across Khan’s physical and virtual schools, and up to 100,000 pupils across 500 US school districts partnered with Khan Academy will access it by the end of 2023.

Khan describes ChatGPT as the gateway to a “very powerful technology” that can be misused. However, if it is adapted to be “pedagogically sound, with clear oversight and moderation filters” language models can be revolutionary.

“I don’t say lightly, I think it’s probably the biggest transformation of our life . . . especially in education,” Khan says. “You’re going to be able to awaken people’s curiosity, get them excited about learning. They’re going to have an infinitely patient tutor with them, always.”

Back in Wimbledon, Lauren and her classmates are becoming aware that generative AI, while useful, is no substitute for some of the most important and rewarding parts of the learning process.

“One of our main takeaways was the importance of being stuck,” says Lauren. “Generally in life you need to be able to overcome little hurdles to feel proud of your work.”

“It’s so vital not to ban the use of it in education, but instead . . . learn how to use it through proper, critical thinking,” her classmate Olivia adds. “Because it will be a tool in our futures.”

A-levels and GCSEs: Covid support in place as exams begin

Exams were cancelled in 2020 and 2021 because of Covid

By Hazel Shearing

Education correspondent

GCSE and A-level students are being told their grades will be protected from Covid disruption, as exams get under way for most students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Extra measures are in place to help pupils, but support varies across the different parts of the UK.

Covid led to an increase in top grades in 2020 and 2021, with results based on teacher exams instead of exams.

England's exam regulator called this year a "step back to normal".

Unlike last year, students in England have not been given advance information about the topics they are likely to be tested on. Grades are expected to fall back in line with results in 2019.

However, some of the adjusted measures from last year remain in place.

Exams will be spaced apart more than they were prior to the pandemic, allowing for rest and revision.

GCSE students will be given formulae and equations in some subjects, and will not be expected to confront unfamiliar words in language exams.

Outside England, grades are expected to remain higher than they were in 2019.

Teenagers in Scotland have already started exams. Modifications introduced in Covid, such as paring back some exams, remain in place.

In Wales and Northern Ireland, many students have been given advance information about what will appear in their exam papers.

Vocational technical qualifications, such as BTec courses, are still mostly assessed through practical learning but some exams and exams have taken place across the year.

As pupils head on study leave, exam boards have warned students not to approach social media accounts claiming to sell exam papers.

In most cases, the papers for sale are fake. Nonetheless, BBC News has been told some students are paying up to £4,000 to get hold of them.

Margaret Farragher, chief executive officer of JCQ, said some accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and other platforms "seem intent on scamming students for money".

"This issue is increasing every year," she said.

Have you been scammed by social media accounts claiming to sell exam papers? Get in touch.

Most teenagers taking GCSEs and A-levels will have been in Year 8 and Year 10 respectively at the start of the pandemic, in 2020.

Many will have experienced further disruption from industrial action this year, although many schools have tried to prioritise exam year groups on days where strike action has occurred.

Rocsi, who is 15 and lives in London, said she was "a little bit nervous" about her GCSE exams, the first of which is Biology, on Tuesday.

"I'm just at the stage now where I want to get it over and done with," she told the BBC.

Rocsi feels that her year group has been disadvantaged by Covid because they started some GCSE courses early, in Year 9 - when schools closed to most pupils for parts of the year.

"It did actually impact us," she said. She says her cohort missed out on in-person learning, such as science experiments, which means they should be given additional help in the forthcoming exams.

Rocsi has been able to go into school during recent teacher strikes. She supports the teachers, but says it has made it more difficult to revise.

"They kept having to group us together to change lessons. It was a bit hectic."

'Long shadow'

More than 200 miles away, in Preston, Olivia, 16, feels "pretty confident" about most of her exams - although she also struggles with the practical experiments she missed out on in Year 9.

Olivia thinks her school has been "really good" at supporting her revision with the online learning tools which were first introduced during Covid. She says she used the days her teachers were on strike to revise at home.

"We have logins to certain school apps, and there's videos on there and quizzes for us to do," she said.

Having equations and formulae in some exams will make the process less of a "memory game", according to Olivia.

"That's not really what they should be testing you on - your memory," she said. "It's if you can actually apply [the formulae] to what you're working out."

Last year, the proportion of top A-level and GCSE grades fell compared to the highs of 2020 and 2021 - but they remained higher than 2019.

Dr Jo Saxton, head of England's exams regulator, Ofqual, said results would be more similar to pre-pandemic levels this year, and examiners would use data to set grade thresholds that were "fair to students".

She said a return to "pre-pandemic arrangements" would give clarity to universities and employers, but Ofqual recognised that this year's candidates, too, had experienced disruption.

"There's no doubt that the pandemic has cast a long shadow, and that's partly why we've put some protections in place," she said.

"A student should be able to get a grade that they would have got had there not been a pandemic," she said, "even if the quality of their work is a little bit weaker".

She stressed Ofqual had introduced checkpoints and deadlines to ensure that the delays that affected BTec and other results last year would not happen again.

Scarlett, a Year 12 student from Essex, will sit her A-levels next year, but has been assessed for a Level 3 BTec in Performing Arts throughout this year - which most recently involved performing a duet from the musical, Wicked.

She told the BBC that this year was more "exciting" than her Level 2 BTec, when Covid restrictions meant she was unable to see some of the plays she was meant to be studying.

"There's definitely more opportunities, because we're able to put on live performances and attend shows and see different things that I wouldn't have been able to do last year," she said.

"Everything's kind of ironed out."

Additional reporting by Branwen Jeffreys and Sallie George.

How to crack UPSC civil services exam? “Self-study, perseverance, practice”

The daughter of a cop father, Smriti Mishra will now join the distinguished Indian bureaucracy after securing an all-India rank (AIR) of four in the civil services exam-2022.

Mishra is from the Allahpur locality of Prayagraj, and is pursuing her bachelors in science from Miranda House, University of Delhi. She chose zoology as her optional subject for the mains exam. Her father, Rajkumar Mishra, is presently posted as circle officer-II in Bareilly.

“I dedicated seven to eight hours of each day to prepare for the UPSC exam. I regularly took notes to consolidate my learning,” she said.

Similarly, Pratiksha Singh of Dhanaicha-Malkhanpur village of Hanumanganj area of Prayagraj has secured 52nd rank in the exam. This was her third attempt.

Presently posted as sub-divisional magistrate (SDM) in Shamli, Pratiksha’s father Prem Bahadur Singh is a teacher in a government school in Delhi and mother Neelam Singh a homemaker.

Pratiksha completed her classed 10 and 12 from a Kendriya Vidyalaya in Ghaziabad. After that she completed pursued bachelors in arts (BA) with geography as her honors in 2017 from Miranda House. She went on to complete her masters from Delhi School of Economics.

Along with her regular studies, she also kept preparing for the civil services. She was posted as SDM in 2020.

“My suggestion to all aspirants is to remain positive and disciplined, and try to learn from your failures. I also believe reading NCERT books of classes 9 to 12 is a must. Prepare a time table and know the syllabus right from the beginning.”

“Coaching helps, but self-study is more important,” said Pratiksha, who shifted to Ghaziabad in 2005 but comes to Dhanaicha-Malkhanpur every year for vacation.

Anirudha Pandey, from Tagore Town, bagged 64th rank in his fourth attempt. Anirudha, who completed BTech in civil engineering from Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology (MNNIT) in 2019, spent the last few years of his life preparing for civils.

Anirudh succeeded without ever going to any coaching. Having passed class 10 with a CGPA of 10 from a Kendriya Vidyalaya in Pune and class 12 with 92.6%, Anirudha took political science and international relations as his optional subjects in the mains.

“In my first attempt in 2019, I could not even clear the preliminary examination. I spent the next two years trying to figure out how to crack the mains. But I did not lose courage. I laid more emphasis on practice as part of my preparation, and practiced with pre-mock tests for the prelims, “test series” for the mains, and gave mock interviews to clear the interview round,” he added.

Don’t just study, practice equally hard, his advice to aspirants.

Anuridha’s father Adarsh Pandey has retired from the Military Engineering Service (MES) and mother Manju Pandey is a homemaker.

Similarly, Shreya Singh, also a resident of Allapur, has bagged 639th rank in her fourth attempt. Originally from Kotwa Hanumanganj, Shreya’s father Shailesh Kumar Singh is a farmer and mother Pankaja Singh a teacher at Central Academy, Jhunsi.

Shreya passed her high school from Central Academy in 2012 with 10 CGPA and class 12th in 2014 with 96%.

In class 12, she was the third topper of the district. After that she pursued BTech from IIIT-Vadodara and then completed her masters in sociology from Uttar Pradesh Rajarshi Tandon Open University, Prayagraj. Sociology was her optional subject in the IAS mains exam.

Abhishek Bind, son of Lalji Bind, a former administrative officer at the district collectorate and currently practicing as a lawyer in the district court, has secured 673rd rank in the exam.

Abhishek is an MTech in Mathematics from IIT-BHU. Earlier, he worked with Microsoft on an annual salary package of ₹38 lakhs. After working there for 15 months, he left the job and went to Delhi to prepare for Civil Services.