Last night, I received an essay draft from a student. I passed it along to OpenAI’s bots. “Can you fix this essay up and make it better?” Turns out, it could. It kept the student’s words intact but employed them more gracefully; it removed the clutter so the ideas were able to shine through. It was like magic. The Atlantic
Its ability to do so well in that niche might be a reminder to us that we’ve allowed academic writing to become a little bit too tightly bound up in a predictable pattern. Maybe forcing us to stretch the kind of assignments we’re giving students is not a bad thing. Inside Higher Ed
The teaching of writing has too often involved teaching students to follow an algorithm. Your essay will have five paragraphs; start the first one in with a sentence about your main idea, then fill in three paragraphs with supporting ideas, then wrap it up with a conclusion. Call it a format or a template or an algorithm. Schools have taught students to assemble essays to satisfy algorithms for judging their writing—algorithms that may be used by either humans or software, with little real difference. If this kind of writing can be done by a machine that doesn’t have a single thought in its head, what does that tell us about what we’ve been asking of students. The unfortunate side effect is that teachers end up grading students not on the quality of their end product, but on how well they followed the teacher-required algorithm. Forbes
AI writing tools bring urgency to a pedagogical question: If a machine can produce prose that accomplishes the learning outcomes of a college writing assignment, what does that say about the assignment? Inside Higher Ed
ChatGPT is a dynamic demonstration that if you approach an essay by thinking “I’ll just write something about Huckelberry Finn,” you get mediocre junk. Better thinking about what you want the essay to be about, what you want it to say, and how you want to say it gets you a better result, even if you’re having an app do the grunt work of stringing words together. Forbes
AI is trained on large data sets; if the data set of writing on which the writing tool is trained reflects societal prejudices, then the essays it produces will likely reproduce those views. Similarly, if the training sets underrepresent the views of marginalized populations, then the essays they produce may omit those views as well. Inside Higher Ed
Artificial intelligence is likely to have some impact on how students write, according to John Gallagher, a professor in the English department at the University of Illinois. When word processors replaced typewriters, written sentences got longer and more complicated, he said. Wall Street Journal
In-class exams — the ChatGPT-induced alternative to writing assignments — are worthless when it comes to learning how to write, because no professor expects to see polished prose in such time-limited contexts. Washington Post
Students will only gravitate to chat bots if the message they are getting from their writing instructors is that the most important qualities of writing are technical proficiency and correctness. Inside Higher Ed
Hold individual conferences on student writing or ask students to submit audio/video reflections on their writing. As we talk with students about their writing, or listen to them talk about it, we get a better sense of their thinking. By encouraging student engagement and building relationships, these activities could discourage reliance on automated tools. Critical AI
It’s not easy to write like a human, especially now, when AI or the worn-in grooves of scholarly habits are right there at hand. Resist the temptation to produce robotic prose, though, and you’ll find that you’re reaching new human readers, in the way that only human writers can. Chronicle of Higher Ed
Here’s an idea for extracting something positive from the inevitable prominence that chatbots will achieve in coming years. My students and I can spend some class time critically appraising a chatbot-generated essay, revealing its shortcomings and deconstructing its strengths. Washington Post
David Chrisinger, who directs the writing program at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago is asking his students to generate a 600-word essay using ChatGPT. Then their assignment is to think of more incisive questions to elicit a stronger response. Finally, they are required to edit the essay for tone and voice and to tailor it to the intended audience. Wall Street Journal
Instead of just presenting conclusions, give the reader a glimpse of your origin story as a researcher, a sense of the stumbling blocks you encountered along the way, and a description of the elation or illumination you felt when you experienced your eureka moment. If you tell stories, tell them well. Chronicle of Higher Ed
Students may be more likely to complete an assignment without automated assistance if they’ve gotten started through in-class writing. (Note: In-class writing, whether digital or handwritten, may have downsides for students with anxiety and disabilities). Critical AI
In a world where students are taught to write like robots, a robot can write for them. Students who care more about their GPA than muddling through ideas and learning how to think will run to The Bot to produce the cleanest written English. The goal is to work through thoughts and further research and revision to land on something potentially messy but deeply thought out. Inside Higher Ed
ChatGPT is good at grammar and syntax but suffers from formulaic, derivative, or inaccurate content. The tool seems more beneficial for those who already have a lot of experience writing–not those learning how to develop ideas, organize thinking, support propositions with evidence, conduct independent research, and so on. Critical AI
What many of us notice about art or prose generated by A.I. It’s often bland and vague. It’s missing a humanistic core. It’s missing an individual person’s passion, pain, longings and a life of deeply felt personal experiences. It does not spring from a person’s imagination, bursts of insight, anxiety and joy that underlie any profound work of human creativity. New York Times
The most obvious response, and one that I suspect many professors will pursue, involves replacing the standard five-page paper assignment with an in-class exam. Others expect to continue with the papers but have suggested that the assigned topics should be revised to focus on lesser-known works or ideas about which a chatbot might not “know” too much. Washington Post
Assigning personal writing may still help motivate students to write and, in that way, deter misuse of AI. Chronicle of Higher Ed
We’re expecting students to use ChatGPT to write a first draft of their paper but then not use it to revise the paper. I don’t consider myself a pessimist about human nature, but in what world do we humans take a perfectly good tool that helped us get from point A to point B and then decline its offer to take us from point B to point C? Inside Higher Ed
Writing teacher John Warner wrote, “If AI can replace what students do, why have students keep doing that?” He recommended changing “the way we grade so that the fluent but dull prose that ChatGPT can churn out does not actually pass muster.” Chronicle of Higher Ed
Assign writing that is as interesting and meaningful to students as possible. Connecting prompts to real-world situations and allowing for student choice and creativity within the bounds of the assignment can help. Chronicle of Higher Ed
No one creates writing assignments because the artifact of one more student essay will be useful in the world; we assign them because the process itself is valuable. Through writing, students can learn how to clarify their thoughts and find a voice. If they understand the benefits of struggling to put words together, they are more likely not to resort to a text generator. Chronicle of Higher Ed
Really soon, we’re not going to be able to tell where the human ends and where the robot begins, at least in terms of writing. Chronicle of Higher Ed
Many teachers have reacted to ChatGPT by imagining how to give writing assignments now—maybe they should be written out by hand, or given only in class—but that seems to me shortsighted. The question isn’t “How will we get around this?” but rather “Is this still worth doing?” The Atlantic
Rather than fully embracing AI as a writing assistant, the reasonable conclusion is that there needs to be a split between assignments on which using AI is encouraged and assignments on which using AI can’t possibly help. Chronicle of Higher Ed
As the co-editors of a book series on teaching in higher education, we receive many queries and proposals from academic writers. A significant percentage of those proposals — which often include sample chapters — are written in prose that reads like it was generated by ChatGPT. The author’s ideas are laid out like bullet points on a whiteboard, the citations are dense and numerous, and the examples and stories (if there are any) are pale and lifeless. The most successful books in our series are the ones that don’t read like that. Their authors have demolished — or at least weakened — the wall that separates their subject matter from their lives. Chronicle of Higher Ed
Also:
21 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection
13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans
20 quotes worth reading about students using AI
22 examples of teaching with AI
27 thoughts on teaching with AI
13 thoughts on the problems of teaching with AI
