Students Should Write With AI, but Profs Need to Curve

Trigger Warning: There will be discussion of AI replacing writing.

I’ve been a philosophy professor for twenty years. This fall, I will require students to use Artificial Intelligence to write take-home essays. But I will use a “curve” to evaluate students. We need curves for AI assisted writing.

Curves

When I was in college, it was all about the curve. In some classes, you got an A if and only if you scored in the top ten percent of the class. There were classes where a test score could be a forty out of a hundred. You didn’t panic. You eagerly awaited the announcement of “the curve” which could mean you actually got a good grade. I remember people complaining about other kids "messing up the curve” because they studied “too hard”.

It’s not hard to see the problems with this grading strategy. On this way of evaluating students, a good grade doesn’t mean that you mastered the material. It just means most students performed worse than you. Your grade reflects how everyone else did as much as how you did. This method incentivizes unnecessary competition rather than learning. Because of this, the last few decades has seen a move away from curves towards “standards based learning”. According to this method, the teacher sets a standard for what counts as mastery and if a student meets it, then they get a certain grade. In principle, most if not all students could get A’s (and sometimes they do!).

Artificial Intelligence

I think the way we evaluate essay writing has to change because the way that students write is changing. Students are using Artificial Intelligence to write. It’s a fool’s errand to try to stop them. But we must grade them on a curve. I don’t see other options.

A teacher who uses ‘standards based learning’ will usually have a specific rubric for what it takes to get a A, B, C and so on in their class. The problem is that the more specific and mechanical the rubric, the easier it is to just put those requirements into an AI chat bot, and with a few tweaks you can get an essay that will be graded with a B or even an A. And we are racing against time here. Pretty soon, AI will just produce A work. Teachers would need to change their rubric, and so on, creating a ridiculous arms race. This whole thing would be a useless exercise.

But suppose you use a curve. Here, you give students the instructions for the paper but tell them that, for example, the papers in the 90th percentile for clarity and persuasiveness get an A. AI won’t be able to produce an A paper with a simple input. This is because (a) it won’t know what the top students are turning in, and (b) all the other students will also be using AI—and will also be asking AI to produce the paper using the same input at a minimum.

I said in the title that everyone in my class will be required to use AI. Since I’m grading on a curve, the student who does the simple thing of putting the essay instructions into chatGPT, hits “return”, and then copies and pastes the answer will get an F for the essay. Today, this student may be getting a C or better. Let’s admit it. This is a disaster.

On the AI/Curve method, a student that gets an A will produce an excellent essay. They will have to spend a great deal of time crafting their paper, interacting back and forth with AI. They can use AI at every turn, from brain storming ideas, to organizing, to constructing sentences (“I need a metaphor in this sentence, give me some options”). Students will also need to do quite a bit of research on their own: Professors can impose very steep penalties for students who submit hallucinated or plagiarized materials. An A paper on this method will be well-deserved.

Of course, this means that the assignment of grades will be more subjective. The teacher will need to make a judgment call as to what counts as an A essay (it can’t just be some mechanical thing in the rubric). Grades are based on comparing students. Issues of bias will creep up and we need to be vigilant about it.

What Will Students Learn. What Will They Not Learn.

We won’t know for a few years how learning will be affected by AI. But we can make some educated guesses about writing. First, students will be less focused on sentence construction, spelling and grammatical issues. This task will just be kicked to AI, the way arithmetic is kicked to calculators.

There’s a worry here, of course, that writing grammatically and smoothly will be lost with future generations (it’s already in decline—I’ve even heard of college professors not even grading for grammar!). This may be so. But no doubt there will always be a small demand for and perhaps larger supply of “made from scratch” writing, just like we have “made from scratch” cooking. (Consuming a well-crafted, wholly produced, human essay may become a symbol of privilege. ‘There is nothing like sitting by the porch on a summer’s eve, enjoying a glass of chilled Beaujolais and reading a fully human made-from-scratch essay. I can really tell the difference, you know. It’s good for the soul’. )

Having outsourced the micro-mechanics of writing to AI, students will be focused on two distinct things which I hinted at earlier. (1) Ideas/argument structure development, and (2) Fact checking. These skills are AI-specific, since they require interacting heavily with AI. My sense is that these are the types of skills which will be needed in the workplace. So the AI/curve method I propose will prepare students well for writing and communicating in their jobs.

How This Whole Thing Fails

There are at least two ways this whole exercise fails. First, students can sell AI companies their “A” papers. These companies can train their models on these excellent papers and promise other students more of the same for an extra fee. Rich students will get A’s. If this happens and we have no way to stop it, then we need to go back to the drawing board.

Second, all writers know that “writing is thinking” and that ideas come to you and get clarified as you write. Exactly how this magic works is not totally understood. But if this is short circuited with AI, then we need to alter our system. For example, we can dedicate in-class time to “write-for-thinking” sessions where AI is prohibited. Students can then take those ideas home and refine them with the help of AI.

Conclusion

It’s inevitable that students will use AI for writing take-home essays. We can allow this, encourage it or even require it. If so, we should seriously consider going back to the curve method for grading.

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