Microsoft integrates ChatGPT 4 into Edge – what does this mean for the written exam?

There will be quite a shift in how artificial intelligence interacts. Just tonight, February 7, 2023, Microsoft presented a deeply integrated and improved version of ChatGPT in their Edge browser and the Bing search engine. Making it an integral part of how we search makes it even more accessible to everyone. Now, it no longer requires an active choice to log in to OpenAI's website. Still, technology is so deeply integrated into how we are on the web that students are unaware that they are using artificial intelligence.

At the same time, artificial intelligence has been unleashed on the web. It can retrieve brand-new and updated information from many different websites - possibly from the same database the search engines use!
Microsoft has even created a sidebar in the browser Bing where you can choose which tone of voice to use when "you" type - e.g., professional, enthusiastic, casual, informative, humorous, etc.

NOTE: Updated 8 February 2023 at 10.00 am

Here is a small selection of what Microsoft itself says about the new Bing:

How is it different from a regular search engine?

The new Bing builds on the existing Bing experience to give you a new type of search. In addition to generating a list of relevant links, Bing consolidates trusted sources across the web to give you a single summarized answer. Search as you speak, text, and think. Bing takes your complex searches and shares back a detailed answer. In the chat experience, you can chat naturally and ask follow-up questions to your first search to get personalized answers. Bing can be used as a creative tool. It can help you write poems, stories, or share ideas for a project.

How does the new Bing generate responses?

Bing searches for relevant content across the web and then summarizes what it finds to generate a helpful response. It also contains sources so you can see links to the web content it references.

Are Bing's AI-generated answers always relevant?

Bing intends to base all of its answers on trusted sources — but AI can make mistakes, and third-party content on the web may not always be accurate or reliable. Bing will sometimes provide incorrect information that it finds, and you may see answers that sound inappropriate but are incomplete, inaccurate, or inappropriate. Use your own decision and double-check the facts before making decisions or acting based on Bing's responses. You can always ask, "Where did you get this information?" to learn more or check the original sources for yourself.

Exams

But what do we do now when students have to take written exams...

There are several options, but none of them are natural solutions that can be done in the short term:

Let students use the artificial intelligence and assess them based on possible access to the new services.
Ditch written tests in favor of oral ones, or do oral defense of written tests.
Turn off the Internet for exams.
Many schools cannot close their networks, as it affects other teaching in the house. If certain pages on the web are closed using firewall, students will easily be able to bypass this with VPN. At the same time, students have to submit online tests, and this requires internet access.
Monitoring of the exams through an exam monitor (e.g., how the now scrapped "The Digital Exam Watch").
Wait and see how big the problem is.
Only students who admit to using ChatGPT will be excluded from the exam.
Change the samples so that it is not possible to use artificial intelligence.
It won't be easy for current written exam forms to achieve since the assignment sets for this year's written exam have already been almost finished. It will also require a change in notices and curricula, which takes a long time.
Let students take written exams with paper and pencil - possibly as a partial test.
A full analogous exam does not reflect how students have been taught and will require a profound change to the entire education system. Nor does it reflect the real world we are educating for. A partial test, where skills are tested, will probably be possible after an executive order change.

In the long term, we need to do something about assessing significance. Right now, we actually only see a form of monitoring using an exam monitor as the only tool that can give a little confidence back to the current written exam forms. However, the challenge is that even the best exam monitors can be cheated. (https://secret.club/2019/03/07/exam-surveillance.html). In addition, there have been such significant challenges with processing personal data on students' private computers, so based on the decision of the Danish Data Protection Agency, the solution has been dropped. (https://www.uvm.dk/aktuelt/nyheder/uvm/2022/aug/220819-regeringen-vil-droppe-den-digitale-proevevagt).

Right now, the ball is in the court of the Danish Ministry of Education, which will have to deal with the new technology so that the individual school does not have to set rules they cannot enforce. It will be a difficult task! A ban cannot be implemented as it cannot be proven with certainty that there has been cheating, and changing examination forms takes a long time. In addition, new technologies come onto the market almost every single day.

What do we do next?

We have only just begun the future of artificial intelligence. Tomorrow, February 8, 2023, Google will present its chatbot "Bard," which will be at least as powerful as ChatGPT and probably also be integrated into Google's search engine. Over the following weeks and months, new tools are constantly emerging that will disrupt how we have thought about teaching and exams for many years.

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Written by

Claus Scheuer-Larsen

M.Sc. and Master's in Multimedia. Lecturer and responsible for pedagogical IT at Odense Technical Gymnasium, teaching communication, IT, and media subjects.

Per Størup Lauridsen

MSc in IT | Co-founder of Viden.AI | Head of IT and Communications at TietgenSkolen