The Professor Has a Hundred Papers to Grade

Imagine a college history professor on Friday afternoon. He has a hundred student essays to grade, and the grades are due Monday morning.

I went to college more than fifty years ago. Maybe professors don't assign papers the way they used to. I hope they do.

A hundred essays on eighteenth-century France, perhaps. Some will be excellent, some acceptable, and some terrible. By Sunday evening, after reading about the French Revolution for the seventy-fifth time, even a conscientious professor might begin to lose his enthusiasm for the subject.

Now suppose he has an AI assistant.

He asks it to sort the papers roughly into Poor, Acceptable, and Good. Originality matters. Accuracy matters. A coherent argument supported by evidence matters. Elegant prose is desirable, but it cannot rescue an argument that makes no sense.

In a few minutes, the machine has done its preliminary work.

The professor still has to grade the essays. He examines the evaluations, reads enough of each paper to satisfy himself that the judgements are reasonable, and gives particular attention to questionable cases. He checks the better papers for originality and the weaker ones for arguments the machine may have overlooked.

Over time, he learns how much he can trust the machine, discovers its weaknesses, and develops his own methods for using it. He remains responsible for the grades and for treating his students fairly.

I suspect something like this is inevitable. Professors are no more likely to spend an entire weekend doing work a machine can help them do than they are to insist that students submit typewritten essays corrected with white-out.

And if professors can use AI to evaluate essays, why shouldn't students use AI to write them?

When I was in college, writing a paper involved considerable mechanical labor. There were outlines, drafts, handwritten corrections, typing, retyping, and trips to the library. A professor might receive a thoughtful paper that was badly typed, misspelled, and covered with corrections.

Word processors changed much of that. Spell-checking helped enormously. Nobody seriously argues that a student who uses a word processor has cheated.

AI goes considerably further, of course. It can research, organize, suggest arguments, write paragraphs, and sometimes produce a remarkably good first draft.

But what matters is what the student does with it.

A student might ask AI to write an essay on eighteenth-century France, accept the result without reading it carefully, and submit it as his own work. I would call that cheating.

Another student might begin with an AI draft, spend hours examining sources, correcting errors, questioning interpretations, developing an original argument, and rewriting the essay until it expresses what the student actually thinks.

That student has done considerable intellectual work. Why should the resulting essay be regarded as less worthy because a machine helped produce it?

I would judge the essay.

Are the sources genuine? Does the evidence support the conclusions? Is the argument coherent? Does the student have something original to say? Is it interesting to read?

I certainly wouldn't rely on an AI detector that announces, with impressive mathematical confidence, that an essay is 100 percent AI-generated. Such a score tells us very little about the intellectual work that went into the paper.

If a student believes an AI-assisted grading system has made a mistake, there should be an appeal. The student can bring drafts, notes, sources, or whatever else helps establish the case. The professor then exercises his own judgement.

He might say, “I believe you spent twenty hours writing this paper. Unfortunately, it's still a C.”

But there is a harder question.

Suppose AI produces an excellent essay without much help from the student. The sources are accurate, the argument original, and the writing genuinely good. The student reads it, makes a few changes, and submits it.

Does that essay deserve an A?

My first inclination is to say no. The student hasn't done the work. But what if the student knows the subject thoroughly, recognizes the quality of the argument, and knows how to direct AI to produce exactly what they wanted?

Wouldn't those be valuable skills in the world outside the university? An employer might be delighted to have such a person.

Still, there's a difference between recognizing a good argument and knowing how to construct one. The intellectual struggle of putting ideas together is itself part of an education.

When I was at UCLA, we took examinations in blue books, those little booklets of lined paper in which students wrote answers by hand. No library, no telephone, no AI, just what you knew and could think about while sitting in a classroom.

I remember a Shakespeare class in which students took copious notes, presumably expecting to reproduce what the professor had told them. Then came the examination question:

Discuss Shakespeare's concept of tragedy.

There wasn't a single correct answer. You had to know the plays, think about them, make connections, and develop an argument. The prose didn't have to be elegant, but the answer had to make sense.

That's something I wouldn't want universities to lose.

Perhaps the solution is to let students use AI in preparing papers while also requiring them, occasionally, to demonstrate what they know without it. A blue-book examination would do. So might a short oral examination in which the student explains and defends the argument in a paper bearing their name.

We could judge the quality of the work and the knowledge of the student without pretending they're necessarily the same thing.

There is another complication: originality.

I've admired the extraordinary fanciful creatures created by the Mexican artist Pedro Linares, the alebrijes. His imagination gave them a vitality that many of the imitations sold in Mexican curio shops seem to lack. Some are beautifully made, but something is missing.

I sometimes have the same reaction to AI writing. It can be excessively orderly, pleased with its own clarity, and remarkably reluctant to say anything awkward or unexpected. It may be technically accomplished and yet lifeless.

We sometimes call that missing quality soul.

But what exactly is it? Human beings produce plenty of lifeless writing, and a beautiful work doesn't cease to be beautiful because it was influenced by another artist. Art has always borrowed, imitated, and transformed what came before.

AI makes the question more complicated because it can already do so much of what humans do when they create. Whether it can produce that elusive quality we call soul, or whether we will even be able to recognize the difference, I don't know.

And I certainly wouldn't want a professor grading a student's paper on the suspicion that it lacked a soul.

I would rather judge the writing for what it accomplishes and find other ways to determine what the student has learned.

After all, universities aren't simply factories for producing essays. Their purpose is to educate people. I want students to learn history, to think critically, to question sources, to recognize good arguments, and to communicate clearly. I also want them to learn how to use the tools that will be part of their working lives.

AI can help with all of that. It can also become a substitute for doing any of it. The challenge is to know the difference.

And professors should use their own intelligence and experience to make those judgements, even when a machine helps them reach them.

The professor has a hundred papers to grade.

Let him use a little help.

Let the students use some help, too.

And let them both exercise good judgement.