[yed]

Considering that many high school kids won’t want to put in any effort at all, how else do you convey the amount of detail and effort you expect for a given writing assignment? It’s an imperfect proxy but I can’t think of a better one.

[notahacker]

Yeah. 1000 words is not a long essay that requires padding, and any competent teacher marks an essay with 1000 words achieved mainly by repetition and bad sentence construction much lower than one discussing the subject matter in a suitable level of detail, and probably lower than a better- written essay which gets marks deducted for only having 985 words.

Since "write an essay" can be anything from three paragraphs to a 50 page paper and the teacher probably doesn't think either is the appropriate response to the task, some sort of numerical guide is a good starting point, even if a fairly wide range is a better guide than just a minimum...

(plus actually there are real world work tasks involving composing text that fits within a certain word range, and since being concise and focused isn't AI text generation's strong suit, I'm not sure those work tasks will disappear...)

[j_w]

Yeah, this is seemingly the only effective proxy for "write with some amount of depth." If the word count gets BS'd then it will be obvious when reading the output.

[Swizec]

> Yeah, this is seemingly the only effective proxy for "write with some amount of depth." If the word count gets BS'd then it will be obvious when reading the output.

My high school professors had a really good solution to this:

Minimum word lengths but you have to write the essay in class by hand. You have 2 periods.

Some of us still write a lot but having limited time and space (4 pages) really put a hard limit without saying so. In higher classes they started saying “I’m gonna stop reading after 3 pages so make sure you get to the point”

[j_w]

I spent 2 years (coincidentally the same teacher for two years) in high school where once a week the only thing done that period was to write an essay (by hand) on some topic/prompt given immediately before beginning.

The grading was thorough and harsh. In college I was never graded harder on writing. My writing and comprehension abilities improved dramatically over that period of time.

[SoftTalker]

With rubrics, or more simply the teacher could hand out an example essay at the start of the year that conveys the style and level of detail they are looking for when they assign an essay. Then they can refer to that when they make an assignment. Implicitly that gives a word count or number of pages, but allows for marking down for "too much repetition" or "needs more detail"

[watwut]

The ambiguous "needs more detail" thing would lead to a lot of students making it too brief in good faith, too long in good faith and both be frustrated and angry. You can write really good mini essay on a topic. And you can write really good super long essay on the same topic.

Demanding that students mind read is not a good strategy. Specifying expected length, checking for it is a good strategy. Teacher should also check for other things - whether paragraphs logically follow, grammar, sentence structure, you name it. But dont make them guess.

[SoftTalker]

A good rubric would remove a lot of this ambiguity.

[watwut]

Unless it contains also minimal and maximal length, it wont. You just cant get away with not making those two clear and transparent.

[tayo42]

When the teacher goes to grade it? If you turn in one sentence with or without a minimum your getting an F...

[SoftTalker]

Many schools these days don't allow an "F" grade if the student makes any effort at all.

[Geezus_42]

Source please.

[SoftTalker]

Wife teaches 4th grade. They cannot give an "F" if the student turns something in. Only for completely missing work.

[Geezus_42]

But like, there must be a document somewhere stating that, right? In my state the school system has publicly documented procedures which are enshrined as laws.