Educators across the country are faced with two options: Either allow students to use AI in their writing/learning processes or start getting creative about how to keep these technologies at bay. One way that teachers are opting for the latter choice is through moving away from the take-home assignment or essay and having students write primarily by hand and primarily in class. This might be indicative of how many more teachers will choose to deal with AI use among students. Dana Goldstein writes,
In the era of artificial intelligence, take-home writing assignments have become so difficult to police for integrity that many educators have simply stopped assigning them.
Instead, in a rapid shift, teachers are requiring students to write inside the classroom, where they can be observed. Assignments have changed too, with some educators prompting students to reflect on their personal reactions to what they’ve learned and read — the type of writing that A.I. struggles to credibly produce.
When ChatGPT can basically create a neat, organized, and polished composition essay, and when AI detection tools can’t be trusted, securing academic integrity gets really challenging. Unless, of course, writing by hand and writing within the classroom makes an honest comeback.
Just last year, Clay Shirky wrote an opinion piece basically calling for a return to more traditional classroom environments. He reminds readers that the format we’re used to using in particularly composition classrooms hasn’t always been the norm. There used to be much greater emphasis on oral exams. He writes,
Talking, listening and reading have been part of academic culture since the beginning, but written assignments — the five paragraph essay, the research paper, reading responses — were not.
Suppose more professors and teachers assigned in-class writing assignments done with pen and paper and held oral examinations to actually test student knowledge? Far from being complicated, this alternative seems far simpler. It certainly saves teachers the constant headache of trying to figure out if students are cheating with AI, and it also seems probable that students will get much more out of their studies this way, albeit with some initial resistance.
Goldstein’s report arrives in lieu of a study that shows AI devices like ChatGPT are correlated with a loss of retention. The more people rely on AI to “learn,” the less information they retain long-term. André Barcaui writes in the paper for Social Sciences and Humanities Open,
Cognitive offloading predicts that when external tools shoulder core mental work, learners expend less effort during encoding; desirable difficulties predict that removing productive struggle reduces durable memory.
If students have to work through problems and ideas without the aid of AI, they will have a much better chance of actually learning information and skillsets. Skipping the process of working through problems and arguments will end up ensuring students learn less, not more.
Despite all of the challenges AI brings to education, a lot of teachers regard it as an opportunity to try something different. Maybe there’s something to be said for the old ways of pen, paper, and some Socratic dialogue.