The ultimate homework cheat? How teachers are facing up to ChatGPT
“Have I seen this somewhere before?”
It’s a question teachers have had to ask themselves while marking assignments since time immemorial.
But never mind students trawling through Wikipedia, or perusing SparkNotes for some Great Gatsby analysis, the backend of 2022 saw another challenge emerge for schools: ChatGPT.
The online chatbot, which can generate realistic responses on a whim, took the world by storm by its ability to do everything from solving computer bugs, to helping write a Sky News article about itself.
Last week, concerned about cheating students, America’s largest education department banned it.
New York City‘s teaching authority said while it could offer “quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success”.
Of course, that’s not going to stop pupils using it at home – but could they really use it as a homework shortcut?
Teachers vs ChatGPT – round one
First up, Sky News asked a secondary school science teacher from Essex, who was not familiar with the bot, to feed ChatGPT a homework question.
Galaxies contain billions of stars. Compare the formation and life cycles of stars with a similar mass to the Sun to stars with a much greater mass than the Sun.
It’s fair to say that ChatGPT let the mask slip almost immediately, as you can see in the images below.
Asking ChatGPT to answer the same question “to secondary school standard” prompted another detailed response.
The teacher’s assessment?
“Well, this is definitely more detailed than any of my students. It does go beyond what you’d expect for GCSE, so I would be very suspicious if someone submitted it. I would assume that they’d copied and pasted from somewhere.”
Teachers vs ChatGPT – round two
Next was a Kent primary school teacher, also unfamiliar with ChatGPT, who gave it a recent homework task.
Research a famous Londoner and write a biography of their lives, including their childhood and their career achievements.
No problem, said ChatGPT, though it’s fair to say that any nine-year-old who submitted the answer below is either being fast-tracked to university or going straight into a lunchtime detention.
“Even just glancing at that, I’d say they copied it straight off the internet,” said the teacher.
“No 11-year-old knows the word tumultuous.”
‘Key decisions’ facing schools
So just as copying straight from a more familiar website is going to set alarm bells ringing for teachers, so too would lifting verbatim from ChatGPT.
But pupils are among the most internet-savvy people around, and ChatGPT’s ability to instantly churn out seemingly textbook-level responses will still need to be monitored, teachers say.
Jane Basnett, director of digital learning at Downe House School in Berkshire, told Sky News the chatbot presented schools with some “key decisions” to make.
“As with all technology, schools have to teach students how to use technology properly,” she said.
“So, with ChatGPT, students need to have the knowledge to know whether the work produced is any good, which is why we need to teach students to be discerning.”
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Given its rapid emergence, Ms Basnett is already exploring how her school’s anti-plagiarism systems will cope with auto-generated essays.
But just as teachers must consider teaching students about the benefits and pitfalls of using AI, Ms Basnett said her colleagues should also be open to its potential.
“ChatGPT is incredibly powerful and as a teacher I can see some benefits,” she said.
“For example, I can type in a request to create a series of lessons on a particular grammar point, and it will create a lesson for me. It would take a teacher to analyse the created lesson and amend it, because the suggested lesson, whilst not bad, was not ideal. But, the key elements were there and it could be really useful.
“I could imagine using a created essay from ChatGPT and working through it with my students to examine the merits and faults of the essay.”
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Will this chatbot replace humans?
Dr Peter Van der Putten, assistant professor of AI at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said institutions which chose to prohibit or ignore the technology would only be burying their head in the sand.
“It’s there, just how like Google is there,” said Dr Van der Putten.
“You can write it into your policies for preventing plagiarism, but it’s a reality that the tool exists.
“Sometimes you do need to embrace these things, but be very clear about when you don’t want it to be used.”
‘Bull****er on steroids’
For students and teachers alike, it’s an opportunity to improve their digital literacy.
While it has proved its worth when tasked with being creative, such as to problem-solve or come up with ideas, true comprehension and understanding remains beyond it.
Developer OpenAI acknowledges answers can be “overly verbose” and even “incorrect or nonsensical”, despite sounding legitimate in most cases, like some sort of desperate, underprepared job interviewee.
As Dr Van der Putten says, ChatGPT is often little more than a “bull*****er on steroids”.
Teaching students about those limitations is the best way to ensure they don’t over rely on it – even in a pinch.
National Guard troops have begun arriving on the streets of Washington DC in a controversial move by Donald Trump to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime”.
The deployment of some of the planned 800 troops comes despite the Washington mayor revealing crime in the capital was at its “lowest level in 30 years” – and with official data also showing a steep decline.
President Trump has promised to take over the district’s police department, something the law allows him to do temporarily.
The army has indicated there were no specific locations for the deployment, according to the Associated Press, citing a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
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Trump: National Guard deployment will ‘take capital back’
At the beginning of the week, Mr Trump said he was sending in 800 National Guard troops to “re-establish law, order, and public safety”.
He announced a “historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse”.
But according to preliminary figures from Washington DC’s Metropolitan Police, violent crime is down 26% in 2025 – after dropping 35% in 2024 compared with 2023.
Pic: Reuters
Washington mayor Muriel Bowser said crime was at historic lows in the capital and called the move “unsettling and unprecedented” – but would use the extra personnel to reduce crime further.
And in a post on social media, she wrote: “Violent crime in DC is at its lowest level in 30 years. We had an unacceptable spike in 2023, so we changed our laws and strategies.”
She said the National Guard would not have the power to arrest people.
Troops will carry no weapons but will have their standard issue firearms, usually rifles, close at hand, an official said.
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The Democrats and other critics have called Mr Trump’s deployment “political theatre” – but the president has threatened to repeat the move in other big cities.
Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for the capital, dismissed a question from a reporter about how violence in Washington compared to other cities.
She said: “All I know is we rank in death. I don’t need any more statistics.”
In Washington, the DC National Guard reports directly to the president.
In the states, the troops answer to the governor except when called into federal service.
It’s beginning to feel like “Midnight Sun” diplomacy.
In parts of Alaska, the sun doesn’t set in summer, casting light through the night but leaving you disorientated.
Ukraine latest: Zelenskyy reject’s Putin’s proposal
The Trump-Putin summit is pitched as “transparent” but it’s difficult to find any path to peace right now.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has reduced it to a “listening exercise” where Donald Trump will seek a “better understanding” of the situation.
There isn’t much to understand – Russia wants territory, Ukraine isn’t ceding it – but Ms Levitt rejects talk of them “tempering expectations”.
It’s possible to be both hopeful and measured, she says, because Mr Trump wants peace but is only meeting one side on Friday.
It’s the fact that he’s only meeting Vladimir Putin that concerns European leaders, who fear Ukraine could be side-lined by any Trump-Putin pact.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy claims Mr Putin wants the rest of Donetsk and, in effect, the entire Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.
He’s ruled out surrendering that because it would rob him of key defence lines and leave Kyiv vulnerable to future offensives.
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‘Steps have been taken to remedy the situation’ in Pokrovsk
European leaders – including Sir Keir Starmer – will hold online talks with Mr Zelenskyy twice on Wednesday, on either side of a virtual call with Mr Trump and US Vice President JD Vance.
Their concerns may be getting through, hence the White House now framing the summit as a cautious fact-finding exercise and nothing more.
The only thing we really learned from the latest news conference is that the first Trump-Putin meeting in six years will be in Anchorage.
Alaska itself, with its history and geography, is a layered metaphor: a place the Russians sold to the US in the 1800s.
Read more:
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Russian traditional nesting dolls with images of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump at a gift shop in Moscow. Pic: Reuters
A remote but strategic frontier where the lines of ownership and the rules of negotiation are once again being sketched out.
On a clear day, you can see Russia from Alaska, but without Mr Zelenskyy in the room, it’s difficult to see them conquering any summit.
In the place where the sun never sets, the deal might never start.
Donald Trump has said he would try to return territory to Ukraine as he prepares to meet Vladimir Putin and lay the groundwork for a deal to bring an end to the war.
“Russia has occupied a big portion of Ukraine. They’ve occupied some very prime territory. We’re going to try and get some of that territory back for Ukraine,” the US president said at a White House news conference ahead of Friday’s summit in Alaska.
Mr Trump also said: “There’ll be some land swapping going on. I know that through Russia and through conversations with everybody, to the good of Ukraine.”
He said he’s going to see what Mr Putin “has in mind” to end the three-and-a-half-year full-scale invasion.
Donald Trump speaks to reporters at the White House. Pic: Reuters
And he said if it’s a “fair deal,” he will share it with European and NATO leaders, as well as Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who have been liaising closely with Washington ahead of the meeting.
Asked if Mr Zelenskyy was invited to the summit with Mr Putin in Alaska, Mr Trump said the Ukrainian leader “wasn’t a part of it”.
“I would say he could go, but he’s gone to a lot of meetings. You know, he’s been there for three and a half years – nothing happened,” Mr Trump added.
The US president said Mr Putin wants to get the war “over with” and “get involved” in possible talks but acknowledged Moscow’s attacks haven’t stopped.
“I’ve said that a few times and I’ve been disappointed because I’d have a great call with him and then missiles would be lobbed into Kyiv or some other place,” he said.
Mr Trump said he will tell Mr Putin “you’ve got to end this war, you’ve got to end it,” but that “it’s not up to me” to make a deal between Russia and Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin is set to meet Donald Trump in Alaska. Pic: Reuters
Zelenskyy says Russia ‘wants to buy time’
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Russia “wants to buy time, not end the war”.
“It is obvious that the Russians simply want to buy time, not end the war,” he wrote in a post on X, after a phone call with Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Pic: Reuters
“The situation on the battlefield and Russia’s wicked strikes on civilian infrastructure and ordinary people prove this clearly.”
Mr Zelenskyy said the two “agreed that no decisions concerning Ukraine’s future and the security of our people can be made without Ukraine’s participation”, just as “there can be no decisions without clear security guarantees”.
Sanctions against Russia must remain in force and be “constantly strengthened,” he added.
European leaders meet ahead of call with Trump
Meanwhile, European officials have been holding meetings ahead of a phone call with Mr Trump on Wednesday.
The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, has been speaking to foreign ministers virtually, saying on X that work “on more sanctions against Russia, more military support for Ukraine and more support for Ukraine’s budgetary needs and accession process to join the EU” is under way.
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‘Russians want to carry on fighting’
Over the weekend, European leaders released a joint statement, welcoming Mr Trump’s “work to stop the killing in Ukraine”.
“We are convinced that only an approach that combines active diplomacy, support to Ukraine and pressure on the Russian Federation to end their illegal war can succeed,” read the statement.
It was signed by UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Finland’s President Alexander Stubb, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
“We underline our unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity,” they said.
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Attacks continue
Despite Donald Trump’s efforts to convince Vladimir Putin to commit to a ceasefire and negotiations, Russian attacks on Ukraine have only intensified in the past few months.
Ukraine’s president has said that, in the past week, Russia launched more than 1,000 air bombs, nearly 1,400 drones and multiple missile strikes on Ukraine.
On 9 July, Russia carried out its largest aerial attack on Ukraine since the start of the war, launching more than 740 drones and missiles, breaking its records from previous weeks.
Furthermore, Mr Zelenskyy has said Russia is preparing for new offensives.
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