[munificent]

I think you're misunderstanding the primary purpose of essays.

Teachers don't have the time to do deep critical reasoning about each student's essay. An essay is only partially an evaluation tool.

The primary purpose of an essay is that the act of writing an essay teaches the student critical reasoning and structured thought. Essays would be an effective tool even if they weren't graded at all. Just writing them is most of the value. A big part of the reason they're graded at all is just to force students to actually write them.

The main problem with AI generated essays isn't that teachers will lose out on the ability to evaluate their students. It's that students won't do the work and learn the skills they get from doing the work itself.

It's like building a robot to do push ups for you. Not only does the teacher no longer know how many push ups you can do, you're no longer exercising your muscles.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> The primary purpose of an essay is that the act of writing an essay teaches the student critical reasoning and structured thought. Essays would be an effective tool even if they weren't graded at all. Just writing them is most of the value. A big part of the reason they're graded at all is just to force students to actually write them.

That's our problem, I think. Education keeps failing to convince students of the need to be educated.

[Zababa]

I think that students know they need to be educated, but they also know that grading/academic success, in the form of good grades and going to prestigious universities, matters more than actual knowledge in the real world. And the funny thing is that if you teach critical reasoning to someone, there's a good chance they will use that skill to realize that the grade of the essay matters more than the actual process of writing it.

I think companies face a similar problem when they try to introduce metrics to evalute performance, either of individual employees or of whole parts of the company, and people start focusing on gaming these metrics instead of doing what's actually beneficial to the company. One reason for that is probably that it's really hard to evalute what actually beneficiates the company, and what part you played in it.

Back to students, maybe writing that essay instead of asking GPT-3 is more beneficial in the long run, but on the other hand you're also learning to use a new tech that will keep getting better, but maybe you're not learning the "value of hard work correctly", etc etc. Evaluating what's good for you is very hard, focusing on a good grade is easier and has noticable positive results. I think getting educated is very important, but I also think no one can certainly known if learning to use AI is actually a worse thing that doing stuff "yourself".

All in all, it's a very hard problem. It's trying to see the consequences of our own actions in very complex systems. And different people work differently. For example, when I use ChatGPT or Copilot, I end up spending more time overall working, and producing way more stuff even without counting what the AI "produced", because the back and forth between me and the AI is a more natural way of working for me. In the same vein, it's easier for me to write or even think by acting out a conversation. Maybe for some people it's the exact opposite and they need to be alone with their thoughts to be more productive.

[munificent]

Delaying gratification is hard for all of us. We're just primates doing the best we can with our limited wetware.

[hndamien]

Seem like it would be fairly trivial to make a document writer that measured if a human was doing the typing such that it was much more likely to have been written by a human sitting and thinking at a keyboard. We do it in ad fraud detection all the time at scale with much less willing participants.

[BurningFrog]

The value of a degree is very clear.

The value of an education is much less clear.

I'm saying the students are probably right.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

> It's like building a robot to do push ups for you. Not only does the teacher no longer know how many push ups you can do, you're no longer exercising your muscles.

While I already knew what you have described, I love this analogy, it's really spot on.

[thelock85]

For this exact reason, I feel like education systems and curriculum providers (teachers are just point of contact from a requirements perspective) should develop much more complex essay prompts and invite students to use AI tools in crafting their responses.

Then it’s less about the predetermined structure (5 paragraphs) and limited set of acceptable reasoning (whatever is on the rubric), and more about using creative and critical thinking to form novel and interesting perspectives.

I feel like this is what a lot of universities and companies currently claim they want from HS and college grads.

[desro]

This is what I'm doing as an instructor at some local colleges. A lot of the students are completely unaware of these tools, and I really want to make sure they have some sense of how things are changing (inasmuch as any of us can tell...)

So I invite them to use chatGPT or whatever they like to help generate ideas, think things out, or learn more. The caveat is that they have to submit their chat transcript along with the final product; they have to show their work.

I don't teach any high-stakes courses, so this won't work for everyone. But educators are deluded if they think anyone is served by pretending that (A) this doesn't/shouldn't exist, and that (B) this and its successors are going away.

All of this stuff is going to change so much. It might be a bigger deal than the Internet. Time will tell.

[sitkack]

I like this technique. You could also take a ChatGPT essay and have the students rewrite it or analyze for style.

Or have a session on how to write the prompts to generate the good stuff. In the hands of a skilled liberal artist, the models produce amazing results.

Yes the tool is powerful, but it still requires skills, knowledge and an ascetic voice.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

A student can't go from zero to "much more complex essay prompts", though. Education has to go step by step. The truth is that humans start at a lower writing skill that ChatGPT. Before getting better than it, they need to first reach its level.

And then, there is the problem that those complex prompts might also become automatable when GPT-4 or GPT-5 is released.

[class4behavior]

>Teachers don't have the time to do deep critical reasoning about each student's essay.

Projection much? Who are you speaking for? What countries, what states?

It's difficult to dive in that deep into someone's essay in any case. That's the challenge, not the lacking quality of one's education system.

[Fomite]

I read every student essay I grade twice. Small classes, admittedly, but this has always been my practice.