It’s beginning to sink in that generative AI is going to force professors to change their writing assignments this fall. Corey Robin’s recent blog post is a model of candor on the topic. A few months ago, he expected it would be hard for students to answer his assignments using AI. (At least, it would require so much work that students would effectively have to learn everything he wanted to teach.) Then he asked his 15-year-old daughter to red-team his assignments. “[M]y daughter started refining her inputs, putting in more parameters and prompts. The essays got better, more specific, more pointed.”
Perhaps not every 15-year-old would get the same result. But still. Robin is planning to go with in-class exams “until a better option comes along.” It’s a good short-term solution.
In this post, I’d like to reflect on the “better options” we may need over the long term, if we want students to do more thinking than can fit into one exam period.