Stop grading student essays and start reading them instead. The ethics of reading (2)

A question for scholars. – How can we spend a lifetime on a chapter in Aristotle and think we’re done with a student essay in two hours? Both can be equally enigmatic.

Writing this little joke back in 2018, ChatGPT was still unheard of in my part of the world. My point was that our teaching practice results in our unlearning to read and encourages mindless writing and reading. Back then, people responded by emphasising that, contrary to texts of “proper” philosophers, student work is being produced and read to be judged with regard to specific skills, so it doesn’t merit further attention. With the advent of ChatGPT, the judging part of this kind of exercise went down the drain. But even back then, the thought that sparked the worry behind my joke was that we have students produce texts that no one wants to read and, basically, that we train forms of writing that no one wants to read. After all, we now know that it’s not only student papers that often get no more than a quick glace, but equally work of peers. As I see it, then, ChatGPT did not alter this situation but just made our practice of mindless reading and writing more visible. At least, we talk about it now.

If this contains at least a grain of truth, then we knew very well before the advent of ChatGPT that our exercises weren’t very promising. Why? Of course, writing is a great thing and should be practised, but grading writing is another matter altogether. Either our responses would have to be very formulaic or they would have to be so time consuming that no one could serve larger classes. So the problem is not that students now have better ways of cheating. The problem is that we don’t and didn’t act well as readers of our student work. No matter whether we act like cops to catch cheaters or just keep rushing through masses of work: we’re acting as a bad role model for good reading and writing. If we rush through student papers, we demonstrate that we only care about grading. Students learn that they should mainly care about grades, too. It’s no surprise, then, that what gets perfected is not the writing but the techniques of cheating.

But this doesn’t mean that students don’t want to write or learn writing. Rather, they probably don’t want to write for readers who spend two to five seconds on a paragraph that took two days to compose. Perhaps what we (should) really feel, now that ChatGPT makes it almost impossible to distinguish real from hallucinated work, is relief – relief that student essays can’t be graded as they used to be. It should encourage us, not to abolish this kind of exercise, but take it more seriously and stop grading it in the way we used to. While we can focus our common grading practices on other kinds of exercises, we could encourage student essays designed as longer projects for those who really want to go through the effort.