This is my brilliant idea about AI use with student essays. You’re welcome 😉
The point of writing a paper is to be expanded in the process of researching, pondering, and writing the paper. Any writer will tell you that you grow in the writing process.
Therefore, merely generating output does not include the “sit at the keyboard and open a vein” (that’s a quote) sort of experience that produces learning and growth.
So here’s what a professor can do:
Feed the paper into an AI. Prompt it to create a thoughtful quiz about the paper. Have the student take this quiz — which will be about their own paper.
If they can pass the quiz, it shows they learned in the writing process — whether it was AI-assisted or not.
If they fail, then they generated it and didn’t even bother to fully read it.
(Or they need a neurology evaluation.)
PS: It’s been fashionable to say recently that em-dash use indicates AI cheating: Nope. Those are my own correctly-placed and hand-typed em-dashes.