Best App To Write Assignments

[Anjali Reyome]

Thenumber one argument I can imagine people having against this perspective is that the current writing system is about teaching the fundamentals of writing. Sure, a lot of what students produce is generic and asks them to do little more than produce a grammatical, logically coherent essay. But students need to get that under their belt before their can tackle more advanced aspects of writing. You need to walk before you can run.

For most of educational history, essays have been a big part of evaluating student learning. But now, with technologies like ChatGPT, for the first time those essays can be manufactured automatically at little or no cost to the student. This has thrown the entire system of writing and grading into chaos. Yet, the question most educators and writers seem to be asking is how we can preserve the original system in the face of this new technology. Another way to look at it is that ChatGPT has revealed the flaws in the system. For years, we\u2019ve been asking students to write essays that elicit generic, unreflective responses. No one seems to think ChatGPT produces the kind of writing anyone wants to read. And yet that seems to be the standard we ask students to meet. Maybe the problem isn\u2019t the new tech; it\u2019s the old assignments.

I went to a high school that prided itself on teaching its students to write well. At the very least, they would tell students and parents, when you graduate from here you\u2019ll know how to write. I always found this claim amusing. When I graduated high school what I had learned was not how to write an essay. It was how to write an essay that teachers would give an A. These were not at all the same thing.

It was clear to me that these were different things because I never did the assigned readings. I would skim the relevant SparkNotes, pull a few key quotes, and make connections between plot points, quotes, and general human themes. Teachers seemed satisfied with this approach, and for the most part I got As. But it was clear to me I wasn\u2019t learning to write. I was learning to bullshit.

If a resource like ChatGPT had been available when I was a student, I don\u2019t honestly know if I would have used it. Maybe. But regardless of what my personal choices would have been, the fact is that ChatGPT has made the cost of composing bullshit\u2014the kind of externally coherent but intellectual hollow work I specialized in as a youth\u2014fall to zero.

And as a result, the educational pipeline is now facing a system failure. Teachers and professors are concerned they can no longer assign essays in the way they used to. For example, in a December 2022 article from The Atlantic, the author presents a ChatGPT passage which she had been sent by a professor friend. The professor considered the passage \u201Cgraduate level.\u201D The author herself gave it a B+; she writes, \u201CThe passage reads like filler, but so do most student essays.\u201D

The truth is, most student essays do read like filler. And yet, when teachers encounter a computer program capable of producing filler, their instinct is to question the technology and not what they\u2019ve been asking their students to do this whole time. I don\u2019t blame anyone personally for feeling this as a gut reaction. This is exactly the kind of dramatic revision of the status quo which is hardest for people to deal with. But at some point we need to pose the uncomfortable question. If the prompts we\u2019ve been assigning produce writing that\u2019s indistinguishable from filler, doesn\u2019t that mean we should be rethinking the prompts?

As it currently stands (and this is definitely subject to change), what defines the prose of ChatGPT and its peers is that it is generic. It gives generic answers. It writes in a generic style. It is a statistical model of baseline, generic human writing\u2014the idealized Wikipedia voice from nowhere in particular. When we say that writing sounds like \u201Cfiller\u201D what we mean is that it meets a baseline standard of coherence without going beyond these kind of generic, exactly-middle-of-the-road insights.

This is just a more technologically sophisticated version of what I was doing in high school. And reflecting on my own experience, it makes me suspect that, perhaps, the system isn\u2019t worth preserving. Certainly not at all costs. Instead of asking how we can perpetuate the existing system for assigning and evaluating essays in light of this new technology, we should use this as an opportunity rethink what exactly it is we are trying to teach when we teach writing.

The point we have to grapple with is that we\u2019re not currently minting strong writers. Academics are a case in point. Anyone with a PhD has gone through pretty much the full educational pipeline. They have successfully completed uncountably many writing assignments. But when is the last time you tried to read an article written by a PhD for a group of their peers? In most cases, it would be a blessing if it had been written by ChatGPT.

And it\u2019s not just academics. Written communication in government or business is rarely as effective as it should be. This is understandable. It is genuinely hard to say what you want to say in written form. It doesn\u2019t come naturally to us as humans. But I think we need to be honest about that and admit that there\u2019s probably a lot of room for improvement.

One of the most obvious fundamental skills is grammar and basic sentence composition. I would agree that a baseline ability to use words and form sentences is important for writing. But I don\u2019t see technology having any impact on this, any more than SparkNotes did back when I was a student. First of all, a lot of this gets taught in elementary and middle school, before students are going to be tempted to turn in counterfeit assignments. Even if that\u2019s not entirely true, the technology to aid student\u2019s grammar and spelling has been around for a long time. Students are still able to form sentences.

Second of all, grammar is more of a social signal than the objective, right-or-wrong skill we credit it to be. The ability to use \u201Ccorrect\u201D grammar reflects whether someone has received an elite education\u2014not whether they can reason logically or write prose worth reading. As a tool of logic, people naturally learn syntactic structures which allow them to get their point across to other members of their community. For example, in one of my favorite ever linguistics papers, William Labov (the founder of sociolinguistics, and one of the first linguistics to truly mount a countermovement to Chomsky) argues that sophisticated grammar can actually obscure the speaker\u2019s point, and that what we think of as \u201Cnon-standard\u201D grammatical structures can actually be more direct.1

Another fundamental skill is how to structure an argument. The conventional wisdom is that students can\u2019t learn to compose more sophisticated forms of essays until they have mastered the basic format. So we teach students to write the ubiquitous, hyper-standardized five paragraph essay: an introduction, three body paragraphs supporting the claim made in the introduction, and a conclusion.

This assumption more reflects what is easier for teachers to grade than what is meaningful for students to write. The inescapable fact is that almost no writing in the real world conforms to the five paragraph template. I\u2019m not necessarily against the five paragraph essay, as I do think it\u2019s a good baseline structure for making an argument. But relying on this as a kind of gold standard of coherent writing seems that it encourages students to learn the rules of the five paragraph essay while excusing them from having to do the more difficult work of thinking through the best way to say what they\u2019re trying to say.

I think it\u2019s worth questioning whether we\u2019re doing a good enough job teaching the principles of argument structure as it currently stands. It seems to me a little like calculus: we tell students that this is the standard to which they must aspire, and then once they\u2019ve learned it we set them free into a world which will pretty much never ask them to deploy it. Is technology really what stands in the way of students learning how to make an argument?

Ultimately, in order to figure out what fundamentals we want to teach, we need to figure out what we want to students to be able to do in the long-term. At the very least, one consideration should be matching what we\u2019re requiring of students to the problems they are going to face after school. This is not the only point of education, but it is an important one. And there\u2019s no rule in real life that says you can\u2019t use technological solutions. For most students, they need to be learning to write with the aid of technologies like ChatGPT, not to learn to be scared of them because using them is tantamount to cheating.

In cognitive science, an individual\u2019s ability to perform an action is a function of two things: their capacity to perform the action, and their motivation to do so. A lot of how we think about education is about in terms of increasing students\u2019 capacity. The need to be better at whatever it is we are trying to teach them\u2014in this case, writing. But they also need to want to be better. And to me, this is the problem that more often than not gets overlooked. Therefore, the bigger gains to be made are not in the effectiveness of our increasing student capacity, but in increasing student motivation.

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