I think new tools like this, are a cause for us to stop and reinspect why we ask students to write essays in the first place.

A lot of English teachers think it’s for the value of English itself. But English teachers are not tasked with evaluating students’ writing just for the sake of the English language itself. Instead is a proxy.

It is a proxy for critical thinking. If it’s too easy to get an AI to write something for you without engaging in critical thinking, then we need to reevaluate what ways we evaluate critical thinking skills.

The solution is not to continue to ask students to write things and look for more and more tools for detecting weather in AI has done it. The way to evaluate critical thinking is to change to a different metric.

For instance, debate.

Start with a topic, have students write about it if you want but instead of grading merely the written response, have two students pair off and debate the topic. Have a third takes notes. Read the comparative notes and evaluate how well students incorporated their reasoning from their essay into the debate.

If the student had an AI write the essay, but understands it well enough that they were able to use that logic to make their own arguments – then mission accomplished.