CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: AI Tools and Homework

NARRATOR: Each new wave of teachers seems to face its own technological upheaval. Calculators, the internet and smartphones were each greeted with gloomy predictions, and each was eventually absorbed into ordinary lessons. Artificial intelligence tools capable of drafting an essay or solving an equation in seconds have reopened that familiar debate, but with a sharper edge: if software can complete the assignment, the purpose of the assignment itself comes into question.

NARRATOR: For Nadia Ferreira, who teaches high school English in Winnipeg, prohibition is a losing battle. Her graduates, she argues, will enter workplaces where such tools are commonplace, and a classroom that pretends otherwise does them no favours. Her students may consult the software, provided they submit the prompts they typed and a brief account of which suggestions they accepted or discarded. What surprises them, she says, is how often the machine delivers polished but unreliable answers, and that discovery has made them far more discerning readers. Stricter boundaries may well suit younger pupils, and not every assignment lends itself to this approach, yet she remains convinced that cultivating judgment is a wiser investment than policing temptation.

NARRATOR: Daniel Price, a former principal who now mentors trainee teachers, is considerably less sanguine. In his experience, the hour a student spends wrestling with a stubborn paragraph is not wasted time but the very substance of the exercise; a flawless draft produced on demand skips the part that matters. He is equally sceptical of the safeguards. The written accounts, he observes, could be generated by the same software, so conscientious students would follow the rules while others quietly outsource the entire task. He would prefer to bring more writing back into the classroom, where teachers can watch an argument develop sentence by sentence. Price does not dismiss his colleague's experiment out of hand; with a roomful of motivated students, he suspects, it might flourish. It is the exhausted fifteen-year-old facing a deadline at eleven at night who keeps him awake.

NARRATOR: Each argument holds up rather better on paper than in practice. Relocating every piece of writing to class hours would crowd out discussion and collaborative projects, a cost that is easy to underestimate. Then again, handing teenagers powerful shortcuts presumes a self-discipline that many are still developing. A more modest path than either extreme looks promising: assigning less work to be done at home, and designing what remains so that whatever the software produces serves as raw material to be challenged rather than an answer to be copied. What schools cannot afford, whatever route they take, is to behave as though the technology will eventually go away.