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Writing a GRE Issue Essay Live - May 15, 2024

In today's rapidly changing world, the role of technology in education has become increasingly prominent. While some argue that technology has revolutionized the learning process, others contend that it has led to a decline in critical thinking skills among students. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, few could have predicted the dramatic effect it would have on technology in the education space. Students, prohibited from leaving their houses, had no choice but to study online. With this transition came myriad tools and resources to aid online learning. The prompt presents two views on the role of technology in the learning process, one positive and one negative. In my opinion, I mostly agree that technology has revolutionized the learning process for the following two reasons, though I do concede that critical thinking skills have been adversely affected by several tools.     First of all, technology has had a profound influence on the learning process because it has enabled learning to occur anywhere and at any time. For example, if a university student in New York were to travel to Tokyo for a two-week vacation, she could still attend her classes, still submit her homework, still engage with her professors and peers (via email and online forums), and largely still participate in the learning process. This was impossible just ten years ago. In addition, students are no longer restricted by time. In the past, they had no choice but to attend a professor’s lecture at a specific time, say 2:00 PM in the afternoon, regardless of whether this worked for them or not. However, in today’s advanced age, students can study even at 2:00 AM in the morning if they so please, especially with the advent of recorded lectures and other online learning tools like YouTube. For millennia, the learning process was confined to certain locales and certain times. If one wanted to study under the great Plato, he had no choice but to live in Athens and adhere to his schedule. In stark contrast, students today can acquire knowledge and engage in meaningful academic discussion uninhibited by these barriers. Naturally, our learning has rapidly burgeoned in just the last decade. Second of all, technology has revolutionized students’ learning because it has provided numerous avenues for them to enhance their critical thinking. For example, educational doctrine for centuries emphasized rote memorization and regurgitation of that knowledge on quizzes and exams. We cannot fault them too much for this approach, for they didn’t have much recourse to do otherwise. However, with the rise of technology, students now have the entirety of our species’ knowledge literally at their fingertips with tools like Wikipedia. Thus, learning has shifted to more critical thinking tasks via project-based learning such as designing apps, conducting experiments in the laboratory, or creating persuasive video presentations with advanced editing tools like Premiere Pro. It is not an exaggeration to state that every person on Earth has access to the full extent of humanity’s knowledge acquired over the past several thousands of years. This in and of itself makes rote memorization and knowledge regurgitation an archaic pedagogical approach. Technology has now made it possible for teachers to critique their students not on their knowledge-base but on their ability to solve complex problems, something sorely needed in our increasingly complicated world.     However, I do concede that the rapid rise of technology, notably artificial intelligence, could undermine students’ critical thinking. First and foremost, the large language learning models (LLMs), which make use of generative AI, pose the biggest challenge. For example, students no longer have to write essays for themselves, and teachers have lost a pivotal tool that, for many decades, was used to assess a student’s creative faculties. With ChatGPT, even the free model, students can produce a 600-word essays in under 10 seconds. Even worse, they can engage in lifelike conversations with these generative AI models to come up with potential hypotheses or solutions to a problem, which, it could be argued, dramatically reduces the need for humanity’s own critical thinking.  Whether technology continues to advance at a pace that subverts our thinking is yet to be seen. Nevertheless, the prospect that the AI models we’re using today are at “their worst” and will only continue to improve does forebode a world where humans no longer have to think for themselves.     In conclusion, technology has been largely beneficial for the learning process. It has enabled us to study unrestricted by place or time and has given us tools that allow us to express our creativity. Yet challenges loom. The rise of artificial intelligence could have a profound effect on the learning process, and not necessarily a good one.