Should College Students be able to use ChatGPT for brainstorming?

 

Should College Students be able to use ChatGPT for Brainstorming?

By: Karina Murillo

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When writing essays or coming up with ideas about the certain topics you’re writing about can be stressful, challenging, and the most difficult part of starting an essay. Artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT have started to become a common way for students who are pursuing a higher education to have an easier way to generate ideas. ChatGPT serves as a tool for students to rapidly generate and refine ideas, transforming initial concepts into clearly expressed thoughts. ChatGPT has grown over these past few years and has become a great tool for college students. ChatGPT can help with various different subjects just by asking it a specific question. College students find this way to be more beneficial with saving time, getting instant help, and it being less stressful. While most professors argue that it is not improving the academic success for students, many students argue that it is a helpful way for at least brainstorming ideas. Educators argue that it is becoming a way where students risk plagiarism, reduce creativity, and also become over dependent on the tool. To college students this might seem like a great way to finish assignments more quickly, but to professors this might seem like it is a fast way to start plagiarism essays, start to lose creativity, and depend on using ChatGPT for each assignment. 

Perspective #1: First Source 

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Many educators think using ChatGPT is a way of cheating; in the article “Chat or Cheat: Academic Dishonesty, Risks Perceptions, and ChatGPT usages in higher education students” Silvia Ortiz-Bonnin argues that there has been an effect from using ChatGPT on students cognitive and social skills (Ortiz-Bonnin). She also highlights the ignorance of people pursuing a higher education and graduating with pure academic dishonesty. ChatGPT has become a source that it is easily assessable for anyone. Students pursuing a higher degree are constantly using it to search answers, generate prompts, summarize problems, complete assignments and more. They are using it to answer problems they should actually be studying for. According to Ortiz-Bonnin “allowing students to graduate through dishonest means directly undermines public trust in professional expertise.” This means students pursuing a higher education like physicians should not be allowed to be using ChatGPT as it is something important. They are taking care of patients who actually need the right care, right medication, and the right diagnosis, but they are putting patients’ life at risk by cheating and using ChatGPT. According to Ortiz-Bonnin “patients would not feel comfortable, or even safe, consulting physicians known to have cheated in physiology and anatomy courses.” If patients find out that they cheated all along they would want to get a hold of the university, they graduated from this would cause conflict to their reputation of allowing the students use of ChatGPT. The growing of ChatGPT has come to the attention of professors and the universities of the academic dishonesty students’ have managed to attain. Therefore, they prohibit the use of ChatGPT in any academic subject, as it’s considered cheating even for brainstorming purposes. 

Perspective #2: Second Source 

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ChatGPT has become a large usage for higher education students providing assistance with basically anything you need help with. In this article, “Chatting and Cheating: Ensuring academic integrity in the era of ChatGPT” Debby R. E. Cotton argues about the negative challenges that ChatGPT has brought for higher education students. The first challenge she mentions was the overreliance on using ChatGPT. Cotton states that “overreliance has become a huge toll on students pursing a higher education as ChatGPT offers a faster way of answering questions.” This means that students rely on using ChatGPT without using their knowledge and think for themselves. Thus, students think it reduces the stress of needing to research something that takes a long time which lowers their critical thinking. The second challenge she mentions is how it’s used to unfairly have advantage over other students. Cotton says “. . . they may have an unfair advantage over other students . . . this could lead to inequities in the assessment process.” This means that some students take advantage of using ChatGPT to create well written high-quality essays over the students who do not use ChatGPT. This makes it unfair to those students who actually work hard to do their own work. This makes it difficult for the professors to identify between which students have their own writing and the students who used ChatGPT to generate their answers. This may have a negative effect as professors don’t know if their students understood the lesson or didn’t and just generated the answers from ChatGPT. The last challenge Debby R.E Cotton talks about is it’s concerns regarding academic honesty and plagiarism. Since ChatGPT has grown, it has brought up the potential of students to use ChatGPT to cheat on their assignments. She explains that “this undermines the very purpose of higher education, which is to challenge and educate students . . .” Students pursuing a higher education need to understand that being dishonest and using plagiarism in higher education is bad. As they are the ones who are going to be helping and teaching the younger generation.

Perspective #3: Similarities and Differences 

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When comparing both sources there is a lot of similarities between Ortiz-Bonnin and R. E. Cotton points of view about using ChatGPT for brainstorming. Their biggest similarity is the use of ChatGPT being considered dishonesty and considered plagiarism. They both argue that “the use of ChatGPT has gotten out of hand for students pursuing a higher education.” As it has become a recent issue of the use of ChatGPT. They both also argue that overreliance has become a significantly huge part of students studying. They talk about how “students depend on ChatGPT for anything.” This means how students use ChatGPT to write essays, help them brainstorm, and to even use it to research. Which concludes that their motor skills of comprehension have lowered due to the reliance of using ChatGPT. Thus, this is bad for students pursing a higher degree as it is something that is necessary for them to learn and understand. 

In contrast there is also a part of differences they both differ on one being that Ortiz-Bonnin suggests that “there has been an effect on students cognitive and social skills.” She explains that because of its influence of using it to cheat it has become a problem in “their ability to evaluate all available information.” Meaning they feel as they are in such a time pressure. When students are faced with time pressure that’s when they are more likely to start to use ChatGPT, as ChatGPT is known for fast thinking and reducing time, which means less stress for students. Thus, this adds up to their social skills as they feel pressured into finishing up their work fast, they are less likely to ask questions to their professors or peers. This creates a negative narrative of the use of ChatGPT as it is being misused. It reduces students cognitive and social skills even if used for a quick search or for brainstorming. 

 In contrast, Cotton thinks one of the main advantages that ChatGPT provides is “asynchronous communication.” She explains that “this feature has been found to increase student engagement and collaboration.” This means that she thinks is a good thing for students to use ChatGPT to create prompts in order to communicate with others. She agrees on the use of ChatGPT but to a certain extent. Overall, they both disagree that ChatGPT is a tool that is great and offers many benefits for assignments.

Strengths and Weaknesses

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Both sources have great points about the use of ChatGPT in brainstorming. But they both do have their strengths and weaknesses in these articles. One of Ortiz-Bonnin arguments strengths were the use of using students to do research on them and seeing the results of the variety of questions asked. This helped determine how many students actually use ChatGPT for some type of help on an assignment. They also asked if they were going to keep on using ChatGPT as a resource to see who gave in. Thus, this research is believable as it is considered using a study method to gain an understanding of how many students use ChatGPT and why. This helped her overall point of why using ChatGPT as a student pursuing a higher education is bad. Cotton’s argument strength was using both reasoning as to why using ChatGPT might be good and why it is bad. This helps the reader understand both sides when reading this article. It also states when students pursuing a higher education should tend to use it and when they should not. She also states the risks and outcomes that could happen if caught using ChatGPT. For her article her weakness would be giving tips on how students should go about to not get caught with using prompts. This is something that an article shouldn’t show as this might influence and help students out. 

Compromise

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Overall, in both articles we can see how different both perspectives are and how they have similarities on why using ChatGPT is bad for brainstorming. So, this brings up the middle ground of why you shouldn’t or should use ChatGPT for brainstorming. Ortiz-Bonnin brings up a good point of overreliance on the use of ChatGPT. As well as Cotton, she thinks is the opposite in this perspective. They both agree that it is considered plagiarism when pursuing a higher education and students shouldn’t do it as it is part of their future. But overall, after seeing both point of views I believe that it is bad if you are pursuing a higher education to rely on using ChatGPT, but it is okay to use it when needing to come up with questions for an exam and to just practice. It is helpful to know when using ChatGPT is bad and when its good. So, it is better if you talk with your instructor to get the green light when using ChatGPT for anything. 

Works Cited

Cotton R. E. Debby. “Chatting and Cheating: Ensuring Academic Integrity in the Era of ChatGPT.” Taylor & Francis, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14703297.2023.2190148#abstract.

Ortiz-Bonnin Silvia. “Chat or Cheat? Academic Dishonesty, Risk Perceptions, and ChatGPT Usage in Higher Education Students.” Springer Nature Link, www.link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11218-025-10080-2#Sec12.