Speaker 3
So this is a way we can remove bias. That's right.
Speaker 2
Let's start with something that's already been part of the media discussion and we'll get to some of the GPD for stuff. But with chat GPT, which is roughly 3.5, most of it is, oh my God, college essays, college applications, going down in flames, stop it, ban it, stop the future. There's a little bit which I'm anticipating where you guys are. It's like, oh my God, how do we use this? How do we amplify it? How do we, we're going to this future? What do we do? So what is your guys reaction and your personal reaction been to chat GPT and what would you kind of offer to people to say, look at what you could
Speaker 1
do? Look at how you can change things. Absolutely. So first, why did it take so long? Because, you know, seriously, when I was starting working on Minerva in 2010, I was assuming, you know, that by the time we launched, this would all be there, right? Because we kept saying, oh yeah, it would all, we designed the program with that in mind, right? So as an example, we don't offer any one-on-one or one-on-two level courses. They just don't exist. We don't issue credit for them. We don't acknowledge them as university level courses because the assumption is you can use some engine to get you whatever information you need and you need to have a basic understanding of things in order to apply it effectively later on. And to me, that is really the superpower of chat GPT, which is that, you know, it was kind of an interesting paradigm that I forget who told me this. He said, look, when you do a Google search, it sends you on a research project. When you use chat GPT, it gives you an answer and that's just a fundamental paradigm shift. You need to be able to understand the difference between a fact and a claim. Chat GPT gives you a claim, right? And it gives
Speaker 1
very well-phrased claim. Let's put it that way, right? It sounds authoritative. It sounds authoritative, it feels authoritative, and it uses a data set of what is in the air, right? And so it gives you a popular claim. And what is more important than being able to train our students to both learn the authoritative way of presenting their claims, but also to be able to take apart those claims and see not that the true or false stuff. The true or false stuff is easy, right? It's the nuance, right? It's then that's the Minerva assessment bottle. It isn't about black and white. It's black and gray. Right? There are certainly wrong answers in the world for any question, and you have to be able to discern what they are. But the real art is to see in the spectrum of potentially correct the answer based on context, based on situation, right? Where are you going to go to? And my hope is that at some point you see this, of course, in the science fiction movies, the chat GPT will say, oh, there's a 27% probability, right? You know, taking this path, right? But that is what the world is. The world is full of that path is 27% probability success. This is 24%. That's 19%. That doesn't tell you what path to take, not even close, right? And that's the art of a real education, right? It's to assume that you're going to have that data and you focus effort and mind around that nuance. It also means that all of a sudden,
Speaker 2
all of the rote work
Speaker 1
that our students have to spend on compiling the information, starting off with answers, will start on, they'll save all that time. And now they can devote that time and I can now, they can make the curriculum even harder, right? And so I can now graduate them even better because they're not spending all of that time that they did otherwise, right? I mean, I think about when I was in college and I was writing essays, what would I do? I would go on, I would just highlight all of the quotes I liked in papers. I would copy and paste the quotes and I would write my paper around them and I would say, how do I connect this quote to that quote? And that was my ChachiPT version, right? But if I could just ask the ChachiPT to do that and then figure out, oh, well, you know, the quote you got wasn't as silly and what I need, find me something different, learn to hone that. Well, that is what we're going to do in real life, right? So embracing it and then elevating standards.
Speaker 2
And this is really the core problem. How can you now make it better? Exactly. Because like, oh, that's a good argument about Plato, but here would
Speaker 1
be a better argument. That's right. That's right. And how do you increase rigor? And in higher ed, we've had 50 years of decreasing rigor, not just in higher ed, in high schools, right? The education model has gone the exact opposite direction. Again, this is a problem of treating symptom versus root cause, right? People think, oh, we've got a root cause, we've got an educational problem. We have varying outcomes, right? Outcome loves all the rest. What's the solution? Lower standards, right? Lower standards. Then it's easy for everybody to go to college, everybody to graduate. As opposed to saying, no, no, no, no, no. The issue is poor pedagogy, poor inclusion, you know, all of the things that don't work, rather than doing the hard work of addressing them, increasing demands on students and giving them the tools to be successful, we say, no, no, no, let's just make it easier. And that's my big worry, that Chachi PT, you know, the devil's bargain between student and professor, which is the less both of them work, the happier they both are, Chachi PT is going to enable that in a big way, right? So there's one thing to try and resist, which is futile and silly. The other way is to say, great, now I don't have, I can do even