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What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?

The demise of the English paper will end a long intellectual tradition, but it’s also an opportunity to reëxamine the purpose of higher education.

We process the world through the composition of text dozens of times a day, in what the literary scholar Deborah Brandt calls our era of “mass writing.” It’s possible that the ability to write original and interesting sentences will become only more important in a future where everyone has access to the same A.I. As one teacher wrote in the Washington Post in 2013, students excelled when they mastered a form of “bad writing.” Melzer has designed workshops that treat writing as a deliberative, iterative process involving drafting, feedback (from peers and also from ChatGPT), and revision. If students were learning things faster, then it stood to reason that Lam could assign them “something very hard.” He wanted to test this theory, so for final exams he gave his undergraduates a Ph.D.-level question involving denotative language and the German logician Gottlob Frege which was, frankly, beyond me.

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