Why Make Students Write in the Age of AI?: Generative AI as a Foil

Abstract

We focus on some learning goals behind assigning analytic essays in our humanities classrooms dramatizes how there is no overlap between them and what a student learns when submitting, as their own work, a Generative-AI-written essay. In the latter case, they submit something that is a kind of mash-up of everyone else’s point of view, and in the former, they submit something which, however jejune or faulty, has already—before we read and grade it—furthered their capacity to think, to know what they think, to express what they think. We review how the student who submits a Generative-AI essay has confused product for process: what we were asking for was not an imagined “right” interpretation of Hamlet, or the right number of words about Hamlet; we are instead seeking proof that our student had sharpened their own point of view.

Presenters

Kristina Zarlengo
Division Head/Instructor, English/Legal Studies, Stanford University OHS, California, United States

Margaret Lamont
Assistant Head of School & English Instructor, English Literature, Stanford University Online High School, California, United States

Details

Presentation Type

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Theme

Past and Present in the Humanistic Education

KEYWORDS

Generative AI, Analytic Essay Writing, Pedagogy, James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf