The Day the Take-Home Essay Died: How I Stopped Grading AI and Started Designing Real Learning

By the fall of 2023, at the start of the school year, I was following the familiar rhythm most teachers know in those first few weeks: establishing standard routines, reviewing classroom norms, and running diagnostic assessments to gauge where students stood academically. Yet, given the breakneck speed at which generative artificial intelligence was evolving, I had a distant feeling this school year would be entirely different from any that came before it.

By then, what I thought was a fad or educational trend, had accelerated into an everyday reality. AI wasn’t just build into the background anymore: It was instantly accessible on every device, rewriting the rules of student output almost overnight and turning the traditional take-home essay into an obsolete artifact of a pre-AI world. 

In my role as a library media specialist, I started reviewing completed assignments from my Intro to Innovation classes. As I looked closely at the essays and open-ended responses, a chill ran down my spine.

Paragraphs of flawless work had replaced the familiar voices of my middle school writers. Vocabulary words they had never used in conversation blossomed across every paragraph, and thesis statements sounded less like teenage reasoning and more like seamless scholarly writing. It didn’t take me long to realize that students had begun using artificial intelligence (AI) to write their essays. 

Source: EdSurge — Read the full article on the original site ↗