How have international students been using ChatGPT?
Students – both domestic and international, both in high school and at university – have been using ChatGPT in various ways.
Computer science students have been using it to write code. In the brainstorming and research stage of drafting an essay, many students ask the bot to guide them to relevant academic sources. However, some students go as far as asking the bot to write their essay completely – which makes them move dangerously into the zone of plagiarism and cheating. Others use them to practice standardized tests like the GRE and TOEFL. For natural science students, it can spot patterns in data or measure levels of biomedical variability.
International students are often doing courses that are not taught in their mother tongue or their primary academic language. They often experience what the academic Elaine Kolker Horwitz has called “foreign language anxiety” (FLA), which affects their academic success. FLA makes them occupy backseats, minimize their participation in class and make themselves “invisible,” hesitate to ask professors for help, and, most importantly here, hesitate to write assignments in that foreign language.
Various tools can help international students struggling with foreign language anxiety write essays. Websites/applications like Grammarly, ProWritingAid, Hemingway App and WhiteSmoke help them check for English grammatical mistakes and typos in their essays. These also improve the overall readability of their work by rewriting confusing sentences and suggesting synonyms. Other websites like Linguee and Reverso help students see how words in various languages are used in context in real sources like movie subtitles and news websites.
The aforementioned websites/apps have been accepted in academia for many years now. They are simply tools that help students the way a calculator does – they are not replacing them in doing the bulk of the work that is research, coming up with original ideas, and knowing how to organize these ideas. However, certain uses of ChatGPT go beyond that. For example, making the bot write your entire essay in a second language or do your entire coding assignment might get you suspended or even expelled for academic misconduct.
How could ChatGPT put a student's visa status in danger?
All universities have a code of conduct and rules for academic integrity. These are always listed on the university's website, and they may even be presented to you in the form of a document that you need to sign at the beginning of your course. It's crucial to remain aware of these rules as an international student to avoid getting into trouble not only with the university but also with the law.
Each university can vary in its degree of strictness over issues like recreational alcohol/drug use on campus, absenteeism and cheating. If a breach of conduct gets a student expelled, he/she usually automatically loses his student visa and has to leave the country within a few weeks or face deportation. Universities generally need to inform the country's immigration department if an international student on a visa is no longer a student. In the US, for instance, it's a federal law requirement for a college to terminate a student's SEVIS (Student and Exchange Visitor Information System) record if he/she is expelled.
As ChatGPT is so new, many universities have only recently added it to their academic code of conduct or are in the process of doing that. In Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Baptist University have both explicitly stated that using the bot without the professor's authorization will result in a reduced grade, course failure, suspension, or even expulsion. In France, the prestigious Science Po banned the bot in January.
Some universities partially allow the tool for certain courses or if the professor gives his/her authorization. For example, at Tufts University in the US, it's prohibited to use ChatGPT in lower-level computer science and engineering courses, but the tool is allowed in some advanced engineering courses – as long as students submit records of all of their interactions with the bot.
Indeed, if you are using ChatGPT with your professor's permission, especially if it's for something simple like finding possible countertheses to your thesis or guiding you to academic sources, you can just add the bot to your bibliography at the end – the same way you'd add an encyclopedia you consulted. That is an ethical use of the bot.
If you use it without permission and for other uses, you could get caught. A Princeton student recently created another software, GPTZero, that can detect if an essay was written by ChatGPT. More ways to detect the use of ChatGPT are likely to emerge in the future. The professor can also simply detect that international students cheated with the bot if the level of English used in the essay is much higher than their usual level in other assignments. As the bot is still a work in progress, the essays it churns out can also be nonsensical, even when they seem to be well-structured. This is especially the case for arts and humanities essays, which can never truly be replicated in a cookie-cutter way.
So be careful with your use of ChatGPT. Using it unethically, even if you think you might not be caught, can put your international student status in danger. With the advent of new technology, the concepts of cheating are also evolving. You do not want to simply have “I didn't know this counted as cheating” as defense if you get caught and are brought in front of an academic misconduct committee.
