Is This the End of the Take-Home Essay?
In this Chronicle of Higher Education article, political science professor Corey Robin
(Brooklyn College, CUNY) says that at first he wasn’t worried about ChatGPT. The skills it
took for a student to coax a plausible essay out of artificial intelligence, he reasoned, were
similar to those involved in actually writing the essay. “I could rest easy,” thought Robin, “in
the knowledge that, at least, I wasn’t not teaching my students what they needed to learn how
to do.”
But then he explored the second generation of large language models and was alarmed.
He asked his high-school daughter to prompt GPT-4 to write an essay he’d assigned the
previous year. The first draft was competent but lacked a clear thesis and had other flaws. But
when his daughter prompted it to fix those shortcomings, the second draft was impressive.
Further prompts produced an essay that Robin says was “as good as what many of my students
produce after a semester of effort.”
With current technology, all a student has to do to produce high-quality essays is be
able to see the difference between good and not-as-good work and prompt AI to improve
drafts. Even students who struggle academically can do that, says Robin – but it doesn’t mean
they can write a good essay themselves. Now, thanks to large language models, they don’t
have to.
Why do teachers ask students to write essays? he asks. And why do we grade them?
Because writing is a helpful medium for students to explore, inhabit, and make sense of worlds
that may be alien to them. “None of that is easy,” says Robin. “Through requiring students to
write multiple drafts, intensive comments on each draft, ongoing revision, and conversation, I
teach them that all writing is rewriting, and good work is just that: work.”
“Academic writing,” he continues, “has never simply been about producing good
papers. It’s about ordering one’s world, taking the confusion that confronts us and turning it
into something intelligible, wresting coherence from chaos. And knowing that that doesn’t
happen spontaneously or instinctively. That’s not a skill for college only. It’s a life-long
practice. Being able to see a situation, picking out those elements that matter and lend it
significance, bringing clarity to obscurity: these are what good readers and good writers do.
They’re what good friends, good parents, and good citizens do, too.”
In spoken conversation, we can replicate some of these processes, says Robin, but
writing is different. It gets our thoughts down on paper (or on a screen), objectifies them,
freezes them in time, and lets us look at them from a distance, as if they weren’t our own,
allowing us to revise and improve them. “That’s what makes writing, and rewriting, such a
distinctive experience – and opportunity,” he says. “It requires you to make your fleeting
thought a hard fact in the world, and to make yourself answerable for that fact.”
This is hard work, and it doesn’t come naturally to most of us. “It’s effortful,” says
Robin. “It’s frustrating. It’s disappointing. Failure looms large. We need incentives to do it. All
of us are vulnerable to shortcuts and escape hatches.” He describes his own procrastination
strategies: surfing the web, lying on the couch, doing e-mail, looking out the window, doing
everything but the work that needs to be done. His students describe similar evasions.
How do teachers deal with students’ struggles? By helping them break daunting
assignments into smaller parts, develop resilience, know where to get help, push back on their
evasions, become patient with their inadequacies. But teachers also need to set clear
expectations and make good use of deadlines, reminders, and sanctions (often in the form of
grades). Robin believes it’s a fantasy to think that teachers can get students to produce
excellent work solely through charisma, teaching skill, and inspiration.
“There is nothing in the realm of work,” he says, “– no matter how interesting or
exciting or desired – that does not entail, at some point, the experience of frustration, self-
doubt, loneliness, and anxiety. Experiences that most of us (realistically, all of us) flee from,
especially when we’re by ourselves, without the helping hand or reassurance or conversational
ease of another.” The threat of bad grades is not what produces this discomfort in students. It’s
intrinsic to the work, even if teachers are doing everything right. Our goal is not to eliminate
that discomfort but to give students the tools to deal with it.
“But for students to really get that,” Robin continues, “– to believe it, to feel it – they
have to do the work. They have to go through the process in order to learn that they can’t run
from it, or outsource it to AI, and, more important, that they don’t need to run from it.”
Sometimes the shock of a critical comment or a low grade turns things around and gets
students doing the kind of work that leads to discovery, clear thinking, and deep satisfaction. If
students know they get by via GPT-4, will they ever achieve that exalted state of mind?
What is to be done? Should teachers assign take-home essay assignments so artfully
framed that AI can’t psyche them out? Should students’ writing be assessed every step of the
way? Should we resign ourselves to the fact that some students will cheat with AI and that’s
their decision?
None of these feel right to Robin. “We shouldn’t let our fear of being cops prevent us
from being good teachers,” he says. “The issue is not punishment but pedagogy. Unlike
policing, teaching is a two-way street. To throw myself into my students’ work, I need to know
that they’re willing to do the work. But neither of us can know that, for certain, until we’re
doing the work, together. Simply leaving it up to students to decide whether they’re going to
do the work, without further comment or intervention or negative sanction from me, is a failure
of pedagogy.”
His solution? This semester, for the first time in 30 years in the classroom, he won’t
assign take-home essays, instead requiring students to write papers, midterms, and finals in
class. This will cut into the amount of class time used for discussing the texts being read, and it
will eliminate some opportunities for revision that are so important to writing. He’s not sure
how this will work out, but he’s giving it a try. It’s a challenge, an experiment, a draft, up for
revision as they proceed.
“The End of the Take-Home Essay? How ChatGPT Changed My Plans for the Fall” by Corey
Robin in The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 15, 2023 (Vol. 70, #2, pp. 34-37);
Robin can be reached at crobin@brooklyn.cuny.edu .
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