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<blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 8938004" data-attributes="member: 7035894">So, I'm going to push back against your push back a bit, because I largely agree with what you are writing, but as a lawyer you appreciate the importance of nuance. I didn't say that essay writing is not a special skill, but that maybe it &quot;was never as special a skill as we had assumed.&quot; There's a difference.What I am saying is that if a strange alien with tentacles for eyes came to earth and studied human high school or college curriculum, they would have to assume that our species held the essay out as the pinnacle of human achievement, given its prominence in our teaching and assessment. But this happened not because essays are the perfect mode of teaching, but because they are relatively efficient to assess. We use essays, or variations on essays (oral commentary, etc.), for everything in two of my three subjects.But a lot of essay writing is basically filler. The reason ChatGPT can pull it off so successfully is that good essays are pretty predictable. So maybe going forward we continue to teach essays so that students understand how to structure and build an effective argument, but we allow them to take advantage of AI for a lot of the writing drudgery. I cannot tell you how often students write lousy essays because they have good ideas but twist themselves into knots trying to transpose them into the expected rhetorical style. My ongoing refrain to students is &quot;just use plain language.&quot;I completely agree that writing AIs are going to unleash a new wave of creativity. But it's scary because those of us doing this for a living have no idea what that is going to be. We are just starting to wrestle with the fact that a lot what we had been doing for generations is probably obsolete. The good news is that it has probably been obsolete for, like, a century, so ChatGPT forcing us to finally make drastic changes to education will be a good thing.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Clint_L, post: 8938004, member: 7035894"] So, I'm going to push back against your push back a bit, because I largely agree with what you are writing, but as a lawyer you appreciate the importance of nuance. I didn't say that essay writing is not a special skill, but that maybe it "was never as special a skill as we had assumed." There's a difference. What I am saying is that if a strange alien with tentacles for eyes came to earth and studied human high school or college curriculum, they would have to assume that our species held the essay out as the pinnacle of human achievement, given its prominence in our teaching and assessment. But this happened not because essays are the perfect mode of teaching, but because they are relatively efficient to assess. We use essays, or variations on essays (oral commentary, etc.), for everything in two of my three subjects. But a lot of essay writing is basically filler. The reason ChatGPT can pull it off so successfully is that good essays are pretty predictable. So maybe going forward we continue to teach essays so that students understand how to structure and build an effective argument, but we allow them to take advantage of AI for a lot of the writing drudgery. I cannot tell you how often students write lousy essays because they have good ideas but twist themselves into knots trying to transpose them into the expected rhetorical style. My ongoing refrain to students is "just use plain language." I completely agree that writing AIs are going to unleash a new wave of creativity. But it's scary because those of us doing this for a living have no idea what that is going to be. We are just starting to wrestle with the fact that a lot what we had been doing for generations is probably obsolete. The good news is that it has probably been obsolete for, like, a century, so ChatGPT forcing us to finally make drastic changes to education will be a good thing. [/QUOTE]

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