HAP11303 – Academic Skills for Biologists. See the study handbook for learning outcomes and further course details

• Second year Bachelor
• Around 170 students
• Prior knowledge and skills in GenAI: most students indicated that they often use GenAI, especially for improving the fluency of their written assignments.

Now that GenAI has seen such a rapid increase in popularity and regular use, it is crucial that students learn about its accompanying risks and limitations.

In one assignment of the course, students learn to assess the quality of introductions to academic articles. In the related tutorial, three introductions are compared: The original introduction, and three AI-generated ones. In duos, students upload the Materials and Methods and Results sections of a given article to ChatGPT. By experimenting with their own prompts, each duo generates an introduction. Then, they examine the introduction generated by themselves, two other duos and the original one in more detail. By summarizing ten strengths and weaknesses for each articles, using the knowledge provided in earlier tutorials. They are given some guidance on what aspects to look into (e.g., presence of a research question, existence of references) but mostly left to their own devices.

The course mostly worked out as expected. Quite some students, when first reading both introductions, wrongly determined that the real one was AI-written, because its writing was more ‘clear’ – but after evaluating both in more detail, most students identified the AI-written introduction correctly. After detailed evaluation, many students indicated that they were quite surprised at the extent and amount of weaknesses of the AI-written introduction, and that it was able to fool them still.

Though the course evaluation had a low turnout and a low score (although higher than last year), it was clear through conversations with the course coordinator and study advisors that most students enjoyed the assignment and learned a lot from it.

A tip to other lecturers wanting to implement a similar assignment in their course is to pick an article of which the introduction meets the style requirements that we teach to students: e.g., a clear research question, funnel approach, written in present tense. That way, there is a good reference to compare the AI-generated introductions with.

Katja Teerds (course coordinator) and [email protected]