One of the courses that I teach in South Korea is a writing course to international students. Essentially, it is with this course students learn the fundamentals of planning, structuring, and writing an essay so they acquire the necessary skills to complete any future essay in their other courses. However, after delivering a course a few years ago, students were offered unfettered access to AI tools such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini, and I noticed an increase detection of AI usage with Turnitin. This obviously posed a range of challenges for educators and professors, regardless their specialism, to assess

After a few years of attempting to curtail student AI reliance or misuse, I am no where closer to where I was a few years ago, let alone establish any clear and detailed criteria to grade student written work, but I have experimented with and without the inclusion of AI. I am sharing what I have been able to establish over the past few years in relation to student writing and AI and I hope this helps anyone else that is in the same position.

Typed Essays

The first approach that I took was something that I had prior experience with – getting students to type out digital essays, but to assess and grade the process from beginning to end. For example, as with previous academic development courses that I had delivered, I decided to give students one essay to choose from a list of say ten. As my international students are in a Business School, it made sense to create a variety of essay topics that could pique the interest of students and no longer would I need to read an essay on the same topic over the semester.

I wanted students to demonstrate their process and progress with regards to their writing skills rather than just completing the written product. So for my course, I included a number of tasks that would go towards their Mid-Term Grade (a total of 20% of their Final Grade) which were weighted as detailed below.

  • Essay Title Brainstorm (5% of Final Grade): Students would look at their chosen essay title and start to add any thoughts or ideas that they have about the topic with no reference to any technology. This task was timed to be 30 minutes and the full five marks were awarded to all who had completed on time.
  • Essay Planning and Structure (5% of Final Grade): This in-class task was based on the ideas from the brainstorming, students would then structure their essay. Students would then start to create topic sentences based on the focus of each paragraph, and then refer to some online sources that they could incorporate as references or citations. For those students that completed the task fully with all topic sentences and a variety of sources, then the full five marks were awarded, while anything that was lacking resulted in reduced marks.
  • Draft Essay (5% of Final Grade): This next in-class task was for students to take their essay plan and to start to expand upon the ideas that they had included. I asked students to ensure the introduction was drafted that included a topic sentence, supporting statements, a thesis statement, and signposting what would be included in the body paragraphs. I asked for a minimum of 600 words and for the body paragraphs to be include topic sentences and supporting statements as a minimum. The conclusion could include bullet points of any arguments or views. If students completed this task, then the full five points were awarded. I would give feedback to students based on their Draft Essay and highlight aspects that I expect to improved upon in the Final Version of the Essay.
  • Final Essay (5% of Final Grade): The last in-class task was for students to improve and complete their Final Essay based upon feedback that they had received from their Draft Essay previously. I would ask students to incorporate a minimum number of reputable sources (i.e., newspapers, academic articles, etc.) that could be used as citations to support student opinions or views. They were also given guidance about creating a bibliography for their Final Essay, and I also sought acknowledgement that the student written work had not been created through the use of AI. Had students completed the work ethically and appropriately without detection from Turnitin, then the full five marks were awarded.

This written assignment was good in principal, but poor in practice. I would suggest that around a third of student written work were detected as being generated from AI of a detection rate of more than 25%, and this raised the question on how I would grade such work, if at all.

Hand Written Response Essays

In response to the large number of student essays being detected as AI generated, despite seeking acknowledgement from learners that they had not relied upon AI to create their written work, it left me in a bit of a quandary. I was asking myself; ‘How would I be able to assess a student’s real written ability?’ and I decided to do some timed in-class writing in response to a business news article.

I gave students 20 minutes to read an unseen business news article on a topic which presented two equally justified points of views, which coincidentally was related to the use or misuse of AI in the creative industries. During the 20 minutes, I asked students to read the article, make notes of any ideas or opinions and plan their essay – something that they had experienced previously with the digitally typed essay.

The second part of the in-class timed assignment offered students 60 minutes to hand write their essay in response to the article. I explained to students that I was more interested in their opinions and views, as well as their sharing of personal experiences related to the topic, with more points awarded towards originality rather than a mere statement about the article.

The result from the strict in-class hand written exam was quite telling, with those that had their work AI detected being the least confident in writing in exam like conditions. However, those that had the least amount of issues in terms of AI detection, were able to construct an essay in a short period of time. However, writing an essay in 60 minutes is unlikely to yield much value and is less about the process and more about the product in strict conditions. So where does this lead us towards?

Trying Out Different Writing Tasks

In a perfect world, we would encourage learners to use AI as a tool for their writing rather than replace the whole process for them. I am now teaching a writing class whereby all students have to complete their writing in-class without reliance upon any technology. At the beginning of the course, I give students a chance to watch the following video below about how to spot AI generated writing and to reflect on its appropriateness in a higher educational setting and as students.

I give students multiple opportunities to practice in-class writing tasks leading up to a mid-term written exam worth 20% of their final grade. I explain to all students that I am looking for a personalised piece of writing (something which is usually not recommended in academic essays), and offer learners a chance to assess anonymous student work as preparation. However, I have noticed a small improvement of student written ability of the term but there are still some learners who struggle structuring their essay in timed conditions. That being said, I would assume these students would be also keen to incorporate AI in their writing to help speed up the process and reduce their anxiety.

Nonetheless, as explained at the beginning of this post, I am no way closer to including AI in my courses and I have experimented with adapting to such changes to writing. These have included the following:

  • Creating a dedicated Google Document for individual students to type their writing within and I explain to learners that they must not copy and paste text. Looking at the history of the Google Document offers some insight into how students have completed their work.
  • Asking students to take a screenshot of any sources cited in their writing and adding it to a dedicated Google Document – AI has a tendency to create non-existent sources.
  • Chatting with students during a dedicated tutorial to discuss about their chosen essay topic, the structure, offer feedback on their writing, as well as highlight any concerns that I may have about their writing. For students who seem to forget about their essay topic or structure, this raises a concern and it may also confirm suspicions or detection from Turnitin.
  • Giving learners a chance to share a link with AI – ChatGPT offers students the chance to link their interaction with the tool to demonstrate how much or little they have relied upon it to create the essay.

If you have any advice about the inclusion of AI with writing courses, it would be great to hear your opinion or experience.