Humanities courses provide critical skills and engage students with diverse perspectives. Out-of-class essays have historically promoted deeper problem understanding. Writing facilitates critical thinking by allowing students to grapple with complex issues over time. However, the rise of ChatGPT threatens the integrity of these assignments in introductory courses. Students increasingly rely on AI for writing, which undermines personal engagement and critical discourse in humanities. ChatGPT can generate high-quality material quickly, challenging traditional expectations of student writing and complicating assessments for educators.
Historically, the out-of-class essay assignment has been among the best assessments for getting students in humanities courses to most fully exercise and develop the relevant critical thinking skills. Through the writing process, students can come to better understand a problem. Things that seem obvious or obviously false before spending multiple days thinking and writing suddenly become no longer obvious or obviously false.
Unfortunately, since ChatGPT became widely available, out-of-class writing assignments keep becoming harder to justify as major assessments in introductory-level humanities courses. The intense personal engagement with perspectives and cultural artifacts central to the value of the humanities is more or less bypassed when a student heavily outsources to AI the generation and expression of ideas and analysis.
Having experimented very extensively with ChatGPT, I have found that, at least when it comes to introductory-level philosophy courses, the material that ChatGPT can produce with 10 minutes of uninformed prompting rivals much of what we can reasonably expect students to produce on their own.
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