How ChatGPT changed my plans for the fall

Until now, I’ve avoided getting myself worked up about ChatGPT.

Prompted by this article by a Columbia undergraduate this past spring, I thought that if a student knows enough about paper-writing to make ChatGPT work for them, in the way this student describes in his piece, without detection by a minimally alert instructor, that student has probably already mastered the skills of essay-writing far more than the author of this piece seems to realize. I at least could rest easy with the knowledge that if a student used ChatGPT to write a paper for me, and it was good, I wasn’t not teaching that student what they needed to learn how to do.

But this recent article, by a Harvard undergraduate, made me think again.

I decided to ask my daughter to run through ChatGPT a bunch of take-home essay questions that I had assigned to my students this past year. One course was on politics and literature, the other course was on American political thought. I’ll admit I take a certain foolish (and, I now realize, complacent) pride in asking somewhat out-of-the-way type questions of my students. So I wasn’t too worried.

The initial answers ChatGPT spat back reinforced my complacence. All of them were well written and structured, good on the surface. There were none of the usual flaws you find in student writing: each sentence logically followed the other, paragraphs had points, transitions were purposeful rather than obfuscatory, that is, trying to cover the tracks of an unjustified leap in logic or evidence.

But all of the answers lacked a clear or strong thesis, provided needless exposition, referred to texts not read for class, and made basic errors about the texts, mistaking their genre and so on. If not easy to prove as not the student’s own work, they’d still be easy to assign a grade of C or lower to, simply on the basis of my rubrics for papers.

I was feeling pretty good about things.

Then my daughter started refining her inputs, putting in more parameters and prompts. The essays got better, more specific, more pointed. Each of them now did what a good essay should do: they answered the question. It became clear that so long as a student has a minimal sense of what a paper is supposed to look like or do, or at least knows what a bad paper (by my lights) looks like, they could easily use ChatGPT to come up with excellent answers to even the most out-of-the-way questions.

Where I had initially thought that such a student would have to have mastered quite a few skills in order to do this—that is, would be able to write such a paper on their own—it’s clear to me now that that’s not necessarily the case. Students just have to be able to spot the difference between good work and not good work, which even the most struggling students can already do. It’s always been amazing to me that students who have a difficult time writing a thesis statement can spot it a mile away in another student’s essay. Likewise, a well structured paragraph or paper. That doesn’t mean they can do it themselves, though.

In all my nearly 30 years of teaching, I’ve never once assigned an in-class test. But it looks like until a better option comes along, I’m going to have to go with in-class midterms and finals. It makes me sad, but I’m not sure what else to do.

Update (4pm)

As much as I complain about grading papers, it makes me sad that I may not be able to do this kind of work with students anymore.

For me, grading was never about grades; it was about the intensive feedback, the ongoing revisions of drafts, the individual conversations with students, that went into doing good work.

Good work was never about writing good papers. It was about being able to order your world, to take the confusion that one is confronted with, and turn it into something meaningful and coherent. And to know that that doesn’t just happen spontaneously or instinctively; it’s a practice, requiring, well, work.

That’s not simply a skill for college classes. That’s a life-long practice, of being able to see a situation, pick out those elements that matter and lend it significance, and bring clarity out of chaos.

That’s critical to being a good friend, a good parent, a good citizen, a good neighbor, and having a good life. I really, firmly believe that. I wouldn’t spend as much time as I do on student papers if I didn’t.

But now it all kind of seems pointless. I’ll still do that work in class, obviously, but there is something about clear writing that is connected to clear thinking and acting in the world, that I don’t think can easily be replicated in other mediums.

The only thing, in my life, that has even come close to what writing forces me to do is psychoanalysis, not therapy, but five days on the couch, with your analyst behind you saying almost nothing. Only on the couch have I been led to externalize myself, to throw my thoughts and feelings onto a screen and to look at them, to see them as something other, coldly and from a distance, the way I do when I write.