Policing AI doesn't work

I propose valuing learning rather than grades

I was reading along on threads when I stumbled on a long discussion about how many students are “cheating” by using AI to write their papers. One paper on racism, written by AI, turned in to a professor by a college student, included the sentence: “As an AI, I do not have a lived experience, but humans do.” This student cared so little about the class, they didn’t even bother to read the paper ChatGPT so graciously crafted for them!

Professors and teachers are wringing their hands, trying to catch students in the act of “cheating.” They want better detectors and they want students to pay a severe price for relying on AI. The idea goes—if they suffer enough, they’ll be afraid to use ChatGPT. They want students to write because that’s where the learning happens. Meanwhile students everywhere are proving they don’t care about the learning as much as the grade. What a mess!

If a student doesn’t want to learn, that student doesn’t have to! It’s always been that way! I was talking to my sweet dad who hated writing papers in college in the 1950s. He paid his roommate to write them for him. When a student doesn’t value learning as the objective, there’s always been a way to game the system.

Today the stakes are higher than ever! In college, maintaining a specific GPA is often tied to scholarship money. If you doubt your skills and you need that tuition paid, using ChatGPT to help you write a paper is a logical, sane decision, in fact.

Learning be damned!

But what is happening in the halls of our academic institutions? Why do we still believe (even after psychological studies have shown otherwise) that grades are the best method to ensure learning? Stress is not optimal for learning. In fact, educators should ask why we reward and punish kids while they are in the process of learning? Grades indicate that kids should already know—not that they are in process.

Back when I first met my favorite writing mentor, Dr. Peter Elbow (who recently passed away in February), he was intrigued by my style of writing instruction. I had learned so much from his books and was putting many of his ideas into practice.

But what set my work apart from his is that my population of students were not subject to grades of any kind.

Peter had tried to create the conditions for grade-free writing instruction in his college classes. He offered opportunities for all kinds of ungraded writing in those classes…but by the end of the semester, he would have to give a grade to his students anyway. And they knew this too. It undermined the freedom he was striving to give them.

What I offered was something really different—kids learning at home, without grades, being taught to write for the sake of learning to write. Wild notion!

The idea was simple—create a space where children were free to explore writing. Think of how your child learned to skateboard—standing on the board, rolling down a driveway, trying to do a kick-flip 35 times in a row with very little success and lots of skinned knees.

Think of a child learning to play lacrosse. That child walks around the house twirling the stick, learning to keep the ball in the net (and sometimes hurling that ball across the living room breaking a vase!).

Think of a child learning to sew. We give that student tailor scrap fabric for practice, we supervise and support the threading of the needle and bobbin the first dozen times the child attempts and fails, we swoop in and get that needle threaded, the child then plays around with the pedal trying to get the right speed and pressure for the specific task. Button holing, zig-zags, turning a corner, finishing the last stitch and tying it off are practiced pressure-free before sewing a pair of pants.

No child is tempted to “cheat” by getting a friend to sew the outfit or videotaping a friend doing the skateboarding trick from a distance so it’s hard to see who is on the board while pretending that they are the skater.

That’s because the objective is to actually DO THE THING. The value is in the activity itself, having the pleasure and joy of being the athlete or tailor!

Peter said to me that he was eager to see how writers grew when they were given the chance to play with writing like a soccer ball. He was curious to see if these kids would value writing over the long term.

Guess what? They do!

Grades are as irrelevant in the context of writing as telling a child that they are being graded to learn how to assemble LEGO kits. When a child is motivated to learn, they put in ridiculous amounts of time to learn the skill or information they value.

AI is tempting—it’s seductive—because students don’t want to write the papers. Let me say it again. Writing papers is not important to them.

Students don’t want to write papers because writing is not a skill they value.

And one of the reasons they don’t value writing is that it has never been associated with what they do value: their own thoughts! They are hunting and pecking out in space for words that a teacher or professor hopes to find on the page. They aren’t digging into their own thoughts to say what they think.

They don’t value writing because the words they put on the page are meant for an audience of one who will find all the faults in the writing. The writing is not for readers (people who want to hear the thoughts in a student’s head). The writing is for a single evaluator who is already annoyed at how many kids are using AI. That evaluator is already antagonistic to the paper before it even gets turned in!

Just pause and think for a minute where your kids do write. Comment sections on social media, lists of toys they want for their birthday, text messages to friends, fan fiction for their favorite books… Kids like writing that they like! They grow when they get to write more without the judgment of adults.

If we want to shift the energy away from seeing ChatGPT (and its fellows) as the solution to grades and scholarships, we have to begin by trusting that kids want to learn (and also have the right to choose NOT to learn). We have to meet them on the field of play, not the court of judgment.

In the last 25 years, what we’ve discovered in Brave Writer is that students value being read. They like having their thoughts preserved and protected in writing. They want to leave a mark that outlasts the moment and that is theirs uniquely—writing is how they do it.

Writing is the tool they use to show off how much they know and are learning. They never needed grades to become writers. They needed the freedom to experiment and the support to grow. They need interested readers.

I wrote about the rise of AI in academics and the need for a revolution in how we think about writing and grades in my new book HELP! MY KID HATES WRITING. It comes out April 15.

Preorder here and claim preorder bonuses (like 3 free months of a paid subscription to this Substack starting April 15).

Would love to hear your thoughts!