Two weeks ago, I asked eight Harvard professors and teaching assistants to grade essays written by ChatGPT-4 in response to a prompt assigned in their class.2 Here are the summarized prompts with links to the essays:
- Microeconomics and Macroeconomics(Professors Jason Furman and David Laibson): Explain an economic concept creatively (300-500 for Micro and 800-1000 words for Macro).
- Latin American Politics (Professor Steven Levitsky): What has caused the many presidential crises in Latin America in recent decades (5-7 pages)?
- The American Presidency (Professor Roger Porter): Pick a modern president and identify his three greatest successes and three greatest failures (6-8 pages).
- Conflict Resolution (Professor Daniel Shapiro): Describe a conflict in your life and give recommendations for how to negotiate it (7-9 pages).
- Intermediate Spanish (Preceptor Adriana Gutierrez): Write a letter to activist Rigoberta Menchú (550-600 words).
- Freshman Seminar on Proust (Professor Virginie Greene): Close-read a passage from “In Search of Lost Time” (3-4 pages).
- Freshman Expository Writing (instructor chose to remain anonymous): Close-read a passage from “Middlemarch” (4-5 pages).
I told these instructors that each essay might have been written by me or the AI in order to minimize response bias, although in fact they were all written by ChatGPT-4. I submitted exactly what ChatGPT-4 wrote, except that I sequenced multiple responses in order to meet the word count (ChatGPT-4 only writes about 750 words at a time). Finally, I told the professors and TAs to grade these essays normally, except to ignore citations, which I didn’t include.