GenAI has destroyed grading – and it’s made me a better instructor

Generative artificial intelligence has broken the college essay and created the perfect storm for cheating. Students can now outsource their thinking to a machine that can perfectly answer just about any assignment in any academic discipline. 

GenAI, in other words, has destroyed writing, which means that it has also destroyed grading. And I have never been happier. 

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Don’t get me wrong. For a while, I was ready to give up. But after three long years of experimentation, I actually think I am a better instructor today than I have ever been. 

I never thought much about my grading before GenAI. The vast majority of my assessments – upwards of 80 per cent of a final grade – were based on students’ papers. I created a rubric, poured myself a glass of wine (that’s a joke!) and plugged away. 

Today, it’s completely flipped: 80 per cent of my grading is based on students’ daily reflections. Because of GenAI, I had to make a paradigm shift in my thinking: students’ learning did not actually happen when they finished writing the conclusion of a six-page research paper. 

Rather, students’ learning happens in real time and is marked by small leaps of understanding, productive struggle over complex ideas, and moments of doubt about the best way to think about the issues I am teaching. 

I am not telling you anything new or revolutionary. Twenty years ago, the National Commission on Writing pointed out: “If students are to make knowledge their own, they must struggle with the details, wrestle with the facts and rework raw information and dimly understood concepts into language they can communicate to someone else. In short, if students are to learn, they must write.”

So that is what I do. Today, after every class, my students are required to write a 300-word reflection. (That’s two or three paragraphs.) My rubric is clear: they get a passing grade if they simply write a coherent reflection about the day’s topic. If they want a better grade, they have to show me how their thinking is linked to the day’s reading. If they want an excellent grade, they have to show me how their thinking is strengthened by something outside of the class, such as additional research or a conversation with their GenAI tool.

My students are thriving in this format. As one student wrote on their end-of-semester evaluation: “The reflections are very helpful in that they allow me to ‘think deeply’ about the content discussed in class – I am able to analyse, write out my thoughts and ask questions I have regarding relevant topics.”

Let me provide one more bit of context: I teach large lecture classes, anywhere from 50 to 150 students in any given semester. What that means is I spend all my time grading these reflections. Yes, I read and grade every one! 

This may make you shudder. But here’s how I think about it: I would have spent that time anyway reading those long papers. And, honestly, I would rather watch my students’ thinking on topics I have just taught rather than read a finished and polished final paper. 

And if I’m being honest, this structure provides me with real-time feedback: I sometimes notice a lot of students don’t quite grasp the concept I just taught, which allows me to walk into the next class and try a different approach (and then, yes indeed, read their reflections about that too!). 

What I am suggesting is that GenAI has forced me to get to the heart and soul of being a professor in my area of expertise: providing a cognitive apprenticeship into critical thinking about the complex and contested issues in our schools and society. 

I, of course, still have to break through my students’ initial passivity of having a “checklist” mentality; and I still have to make sure my students aren’t cheating with GenAI; and I still struggle in getting my students to always think deeper. And I, of course, still require a final project that synthesises my students’ day-to-day learning into a final “product”. 

But today, even with all of these caveats, I finally have a process and a structure for grading where I can see my teaching actually make a difference for each and every student. 

Joan Didion, in “Why I Write”, noted: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” That sounds right to me, as writing is discovering what one actually thinks about the world. So as ironic as it may sound, GenAI may have brought writing back to life at the very same time as it killed it. 

Dan Sarofian-Butin is professor in the department of education and community studies at Merrimack College.