Curriculum

Year 12 Parent/Teacher Interviews 

The Year 12 Parent/Teacher Interviews are scheduled for the evening of Monday 6 March, 3:40 PM to 9:00 PM. Parents/carers may book interview time slots themselves via the TASS Parent Lounge using the interview tab available from 11:00 AM, Friday 24 February. The College will not be allocating interview times. Parents/carers need to ensure interviews are booked by no later than 3:30 PM, Friday 3 March.  

All interviews will be conducted on site in the Mary Mackillop Rooms. Interviews are for five minutes only. There is a three-minute break between each interview to allow the interviews to run smoothly. Please note that parents/carers cannot double book a teacher for a longer interview. Should more interview time be required, parents/carers may arrange with the teacher another mutually suitable time.  

There is an expectation that parents/carers will book interviews with all their son’s teachers. There is also an expectation that students are present for the interviews wearing their full College uniform.  

For parents/carers encountering difficulties logging on to the TASS Parent Lounge, please contact the College’s IT Department via College Reception on 02 9763 1000.  

If for any reason a parent/carer needs to cancel or change a booked interview time, after 3:30 PM Friday, 3 March, please contact the relevant teacher directly.  

Nicholas Phillipson 

Acting Director of Curriculum  

ChatGPT – Understanding the New Technology

Released in late November, ChatGPT by the firm Open AI has garnered plenty of media attention and created new challenges for educators. The following sets out some of the basics around ChatGPT – what it is, how it works, cautions for parents, carers and students, possibilities for its use by educators and the St Patrick’s College response to ChatGPT.

What is ChatGPT and how does it work?

ChatGPT is a natural language chatbot powered by a new type of artificial intelligence (AI). It has been trained on billions of words of text, from books, articles and the Internet, and uses this information to generate human-like responses to user queries (Dillard, 2023). Its use of language is flawless, grammatically correct and it generates responses to queries in a lightning-fast manner. It generates natural sounding text based on predicting patterns of language and determining what should come next based on parameters set in in the prompt from the user. 

It is generally correct, but not always. Where it doesn’t know a whole response, it will tell you. If it is missing some information for a response, it makes things up. Unlike a “normal” Google search, it is continually refining its responses – the more people use it, the “smarter” it will get. 

A user enters a question and the chatbot enters a “conversation” with the user, adding to and refining its response as the user enters more specific parameters in the request.

ChatGPT cannot make predictions about future events, and it cannot access the internet. It has no information in its data set post 2021. ChatGPT, however, is only one of many, many AI programs in development. Bing has a model in beta testing which reportedly has even more human-like responses, and Google has three different versions underway. Predictions are that AI models such as these will be sentient by 2029 (Roose, 2023). 

Cautions for parents/carers and students – and society

In order to access the current version of ChatGPT, users must stipulate that they are over the age of 18 to satisfy the terms and conditions of use. In the US, anyone under the age of 13 should not use the platform because of privacy legislation. How is this relevant to Chat GPT? Because anything you input in a chat belongs to the company and they will use it to continually refine their product (Eliot, 2023). Does this mean you shouldn’t use it? 

No – but users need to be incredibly mindful of what they enter.

Issues surrounding “generative AI” include the fact that the AI platforms may themselves be guilty of plagiarism, harnessing their data from the web and other digital sources, without attribution. And currently, as mentioned above – if ChatGPT doesn’t know something, it will make it up based on text predictions – so using the site and assuming it is factually correct is in fact problematic or even dangerous. The site also has the potential to share and create harmful material as it does not discriminate what sites it has gleaned information from – a site with misogynistic or racist hate materials is just as valid to current AI sites as a legitimate news source.

What does this mean for educators and St Patrick’s College?

The most obvious concern is the increased potential for student plagiarism as ChatGPT can generate seemingly flawless essays against syllabus dot points and include quotes from texts as evidence. Teachers need to be more attuned to the in-class work and skills of their students so they “know” their capabilities and can recognise anything potentially AI generated. As a school, teachers and heads of department have also spent time at the start of this year revising our approach to assessment to minimise any chance that students will be tempted to have ChatGPT or other AI sources generate assessment work for them. There will be fewer hand-ins and a greater emphasis on responses generated or completed in class to ensure a level playing field, to ensure that what we are assessing is a student’s own work.

ChatGPT can also be a support for teachers – taking an existing piece of text and modifying it for a struggling reader, generating a set of revision questions, creating questions from syllabus dot points or even creating a ‘exemplar” response for student critique. 

At this point, we have not blocked ChatGPT on our network as department schools have done. Banning something has the perverse effect of making it more desirable, and there are multiple ways a determined student could get past any such blocks. Instead, we will be discussing ChatGPT openly with students, reinforcing its challenges and dangers, but also being honest about the fact that it will not go away. Generative AI will be a part of our children’s futures and we cannot hide from it. 

We do, however, need to be critical users, and ensure that we as humans move into this next phase of the digital age not losing sight of the importance of our own ability to create, to write, to think critically – to have meaningful work available for all in a society, to be the users of technology and not allow the technology of the future to take away what makes us human.

This is a rapidly changing space and requires our attention and due diligence. I will be delivering a session on ChatGPT and schools at the upcoming Parents and Friends meeting on 22 March.

“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education." 

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Denise Lombardo

Director of Learning and Innovation