Teachers are giving up on at-home writing
- Joanne Jacobs
- May 5
- 1 min read
AI is a better writer than most students and adults, high school and college teachers tell the New York Times. To ensure that students are doing their own work, many educators now "require students to write inside the classroom, where they can be observed, writes Dana Goldstein.
Sixty-two percent of middle school, high school and college students say they regularly use AI for homework, RAND reports. A third use AI to draft or revise writing. "Two-thirds of students said the technology harmed critical-thinking skills," writes Goldstein. But they use it anyhow.
“The standard curriculum was a thesis-driven research essay that students completed on their own time outside of class,” said Marc Watkins, who directs the A.I. Institute for Teachers at the University of Mississippi. “That is, unfortunately, gone.”
Jessica Binney, an AP English teacher in New York, used to assign three-to-five page papers, writes Goldstein. "Now, her students write in-class essays, either by hand or on a laptop with a locked-down browser."
At Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, Matthew Gartner "has his freshman composition students write on paper in the classroom for 30 minutes, then share their drafts immediately in small groups," she reports.
AI detection software is unreliable, say teachers.
Many teachers now assume students won't read assigned books at home. If it's not read aloud in class, it won't be read at all. They have use class time for students to write, because many won't write more than an AI prompt at home. That doesn't seem to leave much time for teaching.
I taught (Secondary Math) for ten years in the Hawaii, 1984-1996 There's a one-year gap, I know.
I learned not to assign homework. If you don't know who did it, it's wrong to grade it. If you don't grade it, students won't do it. Anyway, run one hour a day for 180 days and you'll get in good shape. 180 days, one hour per day, is plenty of time to 'get' the material we call "Algebra I" (really, basic Analytic Geometry in Euclidean one-space and two-space).
That's one Math teacher's perspective. History and English teachers are free to differ.
10% for the paper, and 90% for th knowledge in their paper. ai reads the paper and makes a test on the contents.
I don't know why it's so difficult to have students read outside of class and write/quiz in class. If they didn't do the reading, they get a low grade. Oh, that's really the problem, isn't it?
This is not a particularly difficult problem to solve: just make sure all of the graded work is assessed in class, with homework practice only intended as skill-building preparation for the in-class performance, which pretty well describes performing arts practice, or sports like basketball, for which games adolescents spend hours preparing, without any need for "points" for showing up for practice.
I have had this problem in math long before LLMs came into the picture. I've long had a posted set of rules defining what is, and is not, allowed on assingments in my Grade 7 - 8 class, based on the dead giveaways that someone has used a computer. Violations of any of those is an automatic zero. As I tell my students: if a machine is doing the work, nobody needs you.
Things have gotten so bad that I've been forced to essentially make all work be in class, with only token homework assignments (which end up being a good use for the textbooks we have which offer a pathetically small number of practice problems).
We have seen what…