What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing? by Isabelle Shteyman

What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?

iss57 — 2025-10-05 12:47:58 UTC

By: Hua Hsu

iss57 — 2025-10-05 22:01:38 UTC

"I teach at a small liberal arts college, and I often joke that a student is more likely to hand in a big paper a year late (as recently happened) than to take a dishonorable shortcut. My classes are small and intimate, driven by processes and pedagogical modes, like letting awkward silence linger, that are difficult to scale" (Hsu 5).

iss57 — 2025-10-05 22:07:25 UTC

"But I recently began noticing that some students' writing seemed out of synch with how they expressed themselves in the classroom. One essay felt stitched together from two minds- half of it was polished and rote, the other intimate and unfiltered" (Hsu 5).

iss57 — 2025-10-05 22:14:35 UTC

"Late last year, in a survey of college and university leaders, fifty-nine percent reported an increase in cheating, a figure that feels conservative when you talk to students" (Hsu 5).

iss57 — 2025-10-05 22:17:38 UTC

"A 2024 Pew Research Center survey of students between the ages of thirteen and seventeen suggests that a quarter of teens currently use ChatGPT for schoolwork, double the figure from 2023" (Hsu 6).

iss57 — 2025-10-05 22:20:52 UTC

"Studies show that A.I. is particularly effective in helping non-native speakers acclimate to college-level writing in English" (Hsu 6).

iss57 — 2025-10-05 22:23:53 UTC

"He decided to stop assigning take-home essays. For the first time in his thirty years of teaching, he administered an in-class exam" (Hsu 7).

iss57 — 2025-10-05 22:49:14 UTC

"The return to pen and paper has been a common response to A.I. among professors, with sales of blue books rising significantly at certain universities in the past two years" (Hsu 8).

iss57 — 2025-10-05 22:53:38 UTC

"In April, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, released a report drawn from a million anonymized student conversations with its chatbots. It suggested that more than half of user interactions could be classified as "collaborative", involving a dialogue between student and A.I." (Hsu 10).

iss57 — 2025-10-05 23:02:10 UTC

"Some professors told me that they had students fact-check ChatGPT's work, as a way of discussing the importance of original research and of showing the machine's fallibility" (Hsu 12).

iss57 — 2025-10-05 23:05:21 UTC

"An undergraduate at Northeastern University recently accused a professor of using A.I. to create course materials; she filed a formal complaint with the school, requesting a refund for some of her tuition" (Hsu 14).

iss57 — 2025-10-05 23:11:03 UTC

"Unable to keep pace, academic administrations largely stopped trying to control students' use of artificial intelligence and adopted an attitude of hopeful resignation, encouraging teachers to explore the practical, pedagogical applications of A.I." (Hsu 6).