"Done! Finished! One might expect to hear such exclamations from exultant college students, relieved or ready to rejoice upon polishing off their latest essay assignment. Instead, these are the words I hear with increasing frequency from fellow professors who have come to think that the out-of-class essay itself is now done. It's an antiquated assignment, some say. An outmoded form of pedagogy. A forlorn fossil of the Writing Age, a new coinage that seems all too ready to consign writing instruction to extinction."
"For decades, we've had online resources that might make independent student reading unnecessary, yet we haven't stopped assigning out-of-class reading. If I assign a rigorous novel like Charles Dickens's Bleak House, I've long known that students can access an assortment of chapter summaries online-CliffsNotes, SparkNotes, LitCharts and others, all of which might make unnecessary the intellectual work of deciphering Dickens's 19th-century sentences or wading into the deep waters of his sometimes murky prose."
Many professors believe out-of-class essays are antiquated and express frustration about policing student essays for AI use and reading machine-produced work. The availability of online resources such as CliffsNotes, SparkNotes, and LitCharts has long reduced incentives for close, independent reading of assigned texts. Some commentators question the value of take-home essays if students will employ AI to complete them. Uncertainty about student compliance with reading assignments compounds concerns about assessment validity. The continuing need for students to craft sentences, paragraphs, essays, and conduct research places pressure on instructors to rethink assessment methods.
Read at Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs
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