Instructions
This practice module contains 100 questions from the 2023 session. Please refer to the texts provided in the tabs above to answer the comprehension sections.
Text 1: ChatGPT & Education
1. Recently, I gave a talk to a group of K-12 teachers and public-school administrators in New York. The topic was artificial intelligence and how schools would need to adapt to prepare students for a future filled with all kinds of capable A.I. tools. But it turned out that my audience cared about only one A.I. tool: ChatGPT, the buzzy chatbot developed by OpenAI that is capable of writing cogent essays, solving science and math problems and producing working computer code.
2. ChatGPT is new but it has already sent many educators into a panic. Students are using it to write their assignments, passing off AI-generated essays and problem sets as their own. Teachers and school administrators have been scrambling to catch students using the tool to cheat, and they are fretting about the havoc ChatGPT could wreak on their lesson plans. Some publications have declared, perhaps a bit prematurely, that ChatGPT has killed homework altogether. Cheating is, however, the immediate practical fear, along with the bot's propensity to spit out wrong or misleading answers. But there are existential worries, too. One high school teacher told me that he used ChatGPT to grade a few of his students' papers, and that the app had provided more detailed and useful feedback on them than he would have, in a tiny fraction of the time. "Am I even necessary now?" he asked me, only half-joking.
3. Some schools have responded to ChatGPT by cracking down. New York City Public Schools, for example, recently blocked access to ChatGPT on school computers and networks, citing "concerns regarding negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content." Schools in other cities, including Seattle, have also restricted access. Tim Robinson, a spokesman for Seattle Public Schools, told me that ChatGPT was blocked on school devices in December, "along with five other cheating tools." It is easy to see why educators feel threatened. ChatGPT is an amazing tool that has landed in their midst without warning, and it performs reasonably well across a wide variety of academic tasks and subjects. There are legitimate questions about the ethics of A.I.-generated writing, and concerns about whether the answers ChatGPT gives are accurate — often, they aren't. And I am sympathetic to teachers who feel they have enough to worry about, without adding AI-generated homework to the mix. But after talking with dozens of educators over the past few weeks, I’ve come to the view that banning ChatGPT from the classroom is a wrong move.
4. The first reason not to ban ChatGPT in schools is that, to be blunt, it won't work. A school can block the ChatGPT website on school-owned networks and devices. But students have phones, laptops and plenty of other ways to access it outside of class. (Just for fun, I asked ChatGPT how a student determined to use the app might get around a school ban. It offered five answers, all of them totally plausible, including using a VPN to hide the student’s web traffic). Some teachers are pinning their hopes on tools like GPTZero, a program built by a Princeton student that claims to be able to detect AI-generated writing. But these tools aren't foolproof, and it is relatively easy to trick them by changing a few words or using a different AI program to paraphrase certain passages. AI chatbots could be programmed to watermark their outputs in some way, so that teachers could more easily spot AI-generated text. But that, too, is a flimsy defense. Right now, ChatGPT is the only free, easy-to-use chatbot of its caliber. But there will be others, and students will soon be able to pick and choose, likely including apps with no AI "fingerprints" at all. Instead of starting an endless game of whack-a-mole against an ever-expanding army of AI chatbots, here is a suggestion: For the rest of the school year, schools should treat ChatGPT the way they treat calculators — allowing it for some assignments but not others, and assuming that unless students are being supervised in person with their devices stowed away, they are probably using one. Then, over the summer, teachers can modify their lesson plans — replacing take-home exams with in-class tests or group discussions, for example — to try to keep cheaters at bay.
5. The second reason not to ban ChatGPT from the classroom is that, with the right approach, it can be an effective teaching tool. Cherie Shields, a high school English teacher in Oregon, told me that she had recently assigned students in one of her classes to use ChatGPT to create outlines for their essays comparing two 19th-century short stories that touch on themes of gender and mental health: "The Story of an Hour," by Kate Chopin, and "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Once the outlines were generated, she said, her students put their computers away and wrote their essays by hand. The process, she said, had not only deepened the students' understanding of the stories. It had also taught them about interacting with AI models, and how to get a helpful response out of one.
6. "They have to understand, 'I need this to produce an outline about X, Y and Z,' and they have to think very carefully about it," Ms. Shields said. "And if they don't get the output they want, they can always revise it." Creating outlines is just one of many ways ChatGPT could be used in class. It could write personalized lesson plans for every student; for example, "explain Newton’s laws of motion to a visual-spatial learner" and generate ideas for classroom activities like "write a script for an episode of 'Friends' that takes place at the Constitutional Convention." It could be used as a starting point for in-class exercises, or as a tool for English-language learners to improve their basic writing skills. In that vein, the educational blog 'Ditch That Textbook' has a long list of possible classroom uses for ChatGPT.
7. Even ChatGPT’s flaws — such as the fact that its answers to factual questions are often wrong — can become grist for a critical thinking exercise. Several teachers told me they had assigned students to try to trip up ChatGPT, or to evaluate its responses the way a teacher would evaluate a student's. ChatGPT can also help teachers save time in preparing for class. Jon Gold, an eighth-grade history teacher, said he had experimented with using ChatGPT to generate quizzes. He fed the bot an article about Ukraine, for example, and asked it to generate 10 multiple-choice questions that could be used to test students’ understanding of the article. Of those 10 questions, he said, six were usable. Ultimately, Mr. Gold said, ChatGPT wasn't a threat to student learning as long as teachers paired it with substantive, in-class discussions. "Any tool that allows students to refine their thinking before they come to class and put their ideas to practice is only going to make our discussions richer," he said.
8. In conclusion, the emergence of ChatGPT has raised significant concerns among educators and school administrators, particularly regarding academic integrity and the impact on traditional teaching methods. However, banning ChatGPT from the classroom is not a practical or effective solution for several reasons.
[Full text referenced in questions 1-11]
Text 2: Olympics & E-Sports
1. The Olympic games are old — the first modern ones were held in Athens in 1896 — and so are their fans. The median age of American television viewers of the Barcelona games in 1992 was 39. That rose to 53 for the Rio de Janeiro games in 2016. Overall viewing figures are also down. In the latest Tokyo games in 2021, delayed from 2020, they were a third lower than in 2008.
2. Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), has recognized that the games risk losing their relevance. "We have to stay connected" with society, he said in 2020. To do that, the Olympics are expanding by adding what Mr. Bach described as "youth-focused" sports. In Tokyo, sport climbing, skateboarding and surfing were on the schedule. In Paris next year, breaking (breakdancing) will feature for the first time. No doubt the youth will be thrilled. But if Mr. Bach wants the Olympics to become more relevant to more people, the best idea would be to include e-sports, or competitive video gaming.
3. E-sports attract a huge audience. By 2025 around 320m fans are expected to watch at least once a month, estimates Newzoo, a data firm. In 2021 the peak viewership for the final of the League of Legends World Championship, a fantasy-strategy game, was almost 74m, according to Riot Games, the game’s publishers. The record for the Super Bowl, the highlight of the American football year, was 115m. So far the IOC has approached e-sports like an "uncool dad". An inaugural Olympic E-sports Week was held in Singapore in June. But the choice of events left fans baffled. The archery game, for instance, had only been downloaded 100 times before the tournament was announced. The most recognizable event, "Just Dance", a motion-sensing dance simulator, is not considered an e-sport by aficionados. The experiment drew widespread mockery and many memes. Few people took the competition seriously. Peak viewership was just over 22,000.
4. The IOC should take a cue from the quadrennial Asian Games, which start in the Chinese city of Hangzhou on September 23rd. With 12,400 athletes, the competition will have more participants than the Tokyo Olympics. It will also be the first such large event to include e-sports. As well as athletes competing in traditional sports, gamers from across Asia will battle it out in seven events, including huge hits such as FIFA Online 4, a football game, and League of Legends, which has over 180m players. Organizers of the next Asian Games, in Japan, have confirmed they will also award medals for e-sports. Capturing a large audience is crucial for events such as the Olympics, which have seen infrastructure and security costs skyrocket in recent years. Including e-sports would boost revenues from media rights and sponsorship. The industry was valued at $1.4bn last year, a figure that is expected to triple by 2030, according to Cognitive Market Research.
5. Yet the IOC remains hesitant to embrace the gaming world. It has claimed that mainstream video games do not align with Olympic values. One reason is the perceived association of e-sports with violence. Mr. Bach has said that for the Olympics, there is an "absolute taboo" on "killer games", such as League of Legends. The Olympics may encompass shooting, fencing and boxing, but in Mr. Bach’s view these are a "civilized expression" of actual combat, unlike blasting a cluster of pixels on a screen. There is little evidence, though, to suggest that violence in e-sports spills over into real life.
6. In conclusion, the Olympic Games, while steeped in tradition and history, have faced challenges in recent years, particularly regarding their relevance in a changing digital world. The aging demographic of viewers, declining overall viewership figures, and the need to stay connected with society have prompted the IOC to explore new avenues for expansion. Beyond the potential financial boost, the IOC has other reasons to change its stance. For one, e-sports could bring Olympic glory to a more diverse group of countries. At the Asian Games, Vietnam and Indonesia, middleweights in traditional sports, are among the favorites.
[Full text referenced in questions 12-20]