Jon Krause for The Chronicle
Dear Commons Community,
Corey Robin, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, had a featured article earlier this week in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled, “The End of the Take-Home Essay: How ChatGPT Changed My Plans for the Fall.” In it, he rues about his decision to abandon take-home essays in favor of in-class tests. His is a decision that many faculty are grappling with in this era of generative AI. Here is an excerpt.
“Until this summer, I had avoided getting worked up about ChatGPT. My position, prompted by this Columbia undergraduate’s article in The Chronicle, was that if students know enough about writing essays to make ChatGPT work for them without detection by a minimally alert instructor, they have probably mastered the essentials of the art of essay-writing more than the author of that piece seems to realize. I could rest easy in the knowledge that, at least, I wasn’t not teaching my students what they needed to learn how to do.
But a more recent Chronicle article, by a Harvard undergraduate, made me think again. It showed that GPT-4 — the latest iteration of OpenAI’s GPT software …. could write plausible papers on a range of subjects, from Latin American history to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, that earned A’s and B’s from qualified instructors.”
Robin goes on to describe the benefits of writing as a learning exercise and as a way to organize one’s thinking, He comments:
“Academic writing 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 lifelong practice.”
He concludes:
“When I return to the classroom this fall, I’m going to do something I’ve never done in my 30 years of teaching. Instead of take-home essays, I’ll be requiring in-class writing, including midterms and finals.
I dread this decision. It decreases the amount of class time spent discussing the texts we’re reading, of which there is already never enough. It eliminates the elements of process and revision that are so important to writing. I hope to re-incorporate those elements, but I’m not yet confident or clear about how.
The truth is, I don’t know what is to be done. Some days, I feel like giving up. But as that’s not an option I leave for my students, it’s not an option I can take for myself.
So we’ll approach this situation the way we approach our writing: as a challenge, an experiment, a draft, knowing that we can, and must, eventually revise.”
Excellent insights!
I agree with much of what Robin says especially about the benefits of writing. However, this past spring, I allowed my graduate students to use ChatGPT or Bard for their take-home essay assignments. I did ask them to cite it appropriately and to conclude their papers with an evaluation of using generative AI for their assignments. The nature of these writing assignments were such that they had to relate an issue to their particular school experiences which made it difficult if not impossible for generative AI to write the entire essay. I found the results positive and will encourage them again in the future.
Tony
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