Stop asking students “Show Me Your Prompt!”

As educators continue to grapple with students using AI for assignments, we need to move beyond the idea that showing the original prompt is useful

We’re only a few months away from ChatGPT’s third anniversary. And yet I still see educators being advised to ask students to “show me your prompt.”

The idea sounds good—just as we expect students to show their workings in math (because it’s the process that matters as much as the outcome), why wouldn’t we do the same when using AI?

The problem is though, this is not how most people use AI these days—and it’s definitely not how students should be using it!1

Instead, they tend to work with apps like ChatGPT and Claude through long, winding, and often messy conversations—sometimes spanning multiple sessions and platforms. Much as you would when talking with other people.

As a result, asking students to “show me your prompt” on an assignment is about as useful as asking what they had for breakfast: not very.

The trouble is, it’s hard to help someone see this who isn’t familiar with how students are now using AI, has a million and one things on their plate as the new academic year starts, and is still depending on what they heard about ChatGPT when it was creating waves a couple of years back. And certainly snarky comments on keeping up with the times aren’t helpful.

And so—in spare couple of minutes this week—I thought I’d try vibe coding a demonstration of what it’s like to be a stressed and sleep-deprived student scrambling to use AI to meet an essay deadline with just a few hours to spare …

Related:

More on artificial intelligence at ASU.