this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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chapotraphouse
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Essays should be done in class if they are graded. Not to add a time crunch, but the opposite: at-home assignments leads to unrealistic and often classist expectations of homework time and parental/tutor support. Yes, spending time writing alone is valuable for learning. So is homework. Neither should be scored for a student's grade. At-home essays suffer from the same rampant cheating that homework does, which does a disservice to everyone involved in terms of learning. It's important to distinguish evaluations from the act of learning itself, the two are not synonymous: if students' essays are to be graded, they should be done under proctorship and with time and venue alotted for fairness, subject to special cases. Many standardized tests have essay portions and for all the problems with standardized testing, it is appropriate that they don't let test takers go home and mull over it for as long as their economic and support sotiation allows.
Writing essays in class runs into a time crunch in most primary and secondary schools because each class is alotted an arbitrary hourish window once per day. But there are schools that do 2+ hour sessions and have off days, making this practical. A student can write a rough draft one day, turn it in, get feedback, and then polish and turn it in for a grade. And universities can always dedicate appropriate amounts of class time, they just don't want to pay TAs for anything that can be turned into homework time. Too busy doing financialized real estate schemes instead.
Re: LLMs, they can produce essays yep. This is an indictment of a course that grades take-home essays. The course was already inappropriately constructed. The LLM didn't cause the problem here, it just exacerbated the existing problem that manifests as standard cheating (paying/bullying for essays), generally accepted soft cheating (parents write the essay), generally accepted classist legs up (parents help but don't write it/tutors do the same), and the inequalities in free time that impacts students heavily enough already.
Then it has a good chance of regurgitating it. But this is very close to reusing test questions, which is already bad practice and leads to cheating. It's true that an LLM will solve a problem that none of the students have seen if the teacher's strategy of synthesis is to Google for examples, though. That pary is unfortunate but an assessment shouldn't be done in the context where someone can use an LLM anyways. Either way it's not synthesis.
The topics aren't novel at all. But that doesn't really have anything to do with rote memorization regurgitation vs. synthesis. Synthesis questions are often new and different, even just changing the words used for a biological process for a question will strip memorization and force a focus on concepts. Add a follow up question to relate it to something else that was learned and you get synthesis. This is actually a very easy kind of test to write if you practice it.
Assessments should be done in-person. In-person assessments can include simple recall questions. At-home work that is simple recall questions can already be solved by just Googling things. And you're describing a problem in course design. It's not individual teachers' faults that schooling is broken.
Re: the rest, you seem to think that I am picking on teachers. Not sure why.