"But the reality is very different. The prose is usually terrible and the ideas a bad rehash of class lectures. Grading these essays is pure torture. Anecdotally, I've heard many say that evaluating papers is the worst part of teaching. If Dante had known about grading, he would have added a new circle of hell where the damned have to grade one bad paper after another for all eternity."
"And now we have AI, or "artificial intelligence," in the form of ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini and a host of other platforms. Submit a prompt, and these programs spit out an essay that, aside from the occasional hallucination, is actually pretty good. Grammatical mistakes are rare; there's a thesis, evidence and organization. Even worse, using AI for schoolwork is rampant in both K-12 and higher ed."
"What to do? If you have a large class, interviewing students about their essays to ensure they didn't use AI is impractical, and randomly choosing students to interview could lead to charges of bias. Besides, suspecting everyone of plagiarism destroys the class atmosphere. Many have gone back to handwritten exams and in-class writing assignments. But grading a pile of blue books is as agonizingly tedious as a pile of papers. My solution has been to replace the final research paper with"
Professors frequently find traditional term papers ineffective for teaching research and writing skills, as student prose is often poor and ideas merely rehashed from lectures. The intended learning outcomes—gathering broad information, weighing conflicting interpretations, and producing original analysis—often do not occur. Grading such papers is widely experienced as tedious and demoralizing. Modern AI tools can generate coherent, well-organized essays with few grammatical errors, and usage of these tools is spreading in K–12 and higher education. Detecting AI-produced work is increasingly difficult, and large-scale verification strategies or blanket suspicion damage classroom trust. Returning to in-class handwritten work reduces some risks but preserves heavy grading burdens.
Read at Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs
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