The traditional essay is dead as an assessment tool, so what should we do instead?

Unless you've been hiding under a conveniently large rock over the last two weeks, you will no doubt have heard about ChatGPT, the latest AI offering (specifically, a 'large language model') from OpenAI. ChatGPT will take a text prompt and create a convincing text response that is at least as good as what you might get from a real human. The uses of ChatGPT are nearly endless, but one use case in particular should have teachers and lecturers very worried. As the Financial Times reported earlier this week (gated):

Universities are being urged to safeguard against the use of artificial intelligence to write essays after the emergence of a sophisticated chatbot that can imitate academic work, leading to a debate over better ways to evaluate students in the future.

ChatGPT, a program created by Microsoft-backed company OpenAI that can form arguments and write convincing swaths of text, has led to widespread concern that students will use the software to cheat on written assignments.

Academics, higher education consultants and cognitive scientists across the world have suggested universities develop new modes of assessment in response to the threat to academic integrity posed by AI...

Moving to more interactive assessments or reflective work could be costly and challenging for an already cash-strapped sector, said Charles Knight, a higher education consultant.

“The reason the written essay is so successful is partly economic,” he added. “If you do [other] assessment, the cost and the time needed increases.”

The traditional essay is dead as an assessment tool. Academic integrity cannot be assured in essay writing, when students can use ChatGPT to create a convincing essay with almost no effort. However, the death of the essay need not be a bad thing. The main problem with essays are that they are not authentic assessments. Almost no student, once they have graduated, is going to have to write an essay as part of their job. Asking students to write essays is asking them to develop skills that are mostly unnecessary for the real world that they will be graduating into. That's why I haven't used essays as an assessment in any of my papers since 2005.

Written communication skills remain valuable, but students are more likely to be asked to display them in writing reports, policy briefs, or memos, not essays. Any of those other written forms would be a more authentic assessment than an essay. However, they are all likely to be vulnerable to students' use of ChatGPT.

So, if all of those written forms of assessment are vulnerable, what to do instead? Teachers and lecturers will still want students to demonstrate their learning in a written format. One alternative is to get students to submit draft pieces of writing (essays, reports, etc.) and provide formative feedback. Then, rather than being assessed on the content itself, students are assessed on how well they responded to the feedback. That might even be an authentic assessment for the future of office and policy work. If we are worried now about students writing essays and reports using ChatGPT, you can bet that there are already government reports, policy briefs, or memos where the first draft has been written by ChatGPT. Teaching students how to use these tools and improve on them (even if that means encouraging their use) may well be the best way to prepare students for their future jobs.

A second option is to move from written assessment such as essays to a question-and-answer format like assignments. Of course, assignments are also vulnerable to ChatGPT. Maybe even more so than for essays, unless the questions and the assessment criteria are carefully selected. In subjects where answers are entirely in the form of simple written answers, or answers are purely mathematical, this is likely to be a big problem. Economics is a bit lucky here, because we can write assignment questions that require a diagram and associated explanation. For the moment, ChatGPT cannot draw diagrams, and cannot refer to a particular diagram in a sensible way. That's why I continue to use this style of assessment in my ECONS102 class. However, the days of assignment questions may be numbered as well.

A third option is to eliminate the unsupervised written assessment entirely, and move to supervised writing. When I taught graduate development economics, part of the assessment was made up of short supervised open-book essays. Students, with no access to online sources including ChatGPT, could be asked to write about topics where they have been required to do some background reading (but without knowing exactly what they are going to be asked). Alternatively, we can move full circle, back to the majority of assessment being in-class written tests and exams (this is the approach that, until recently, we used in my ECONS101 class).

Finally, other in-person assessments, such as group or individual presentations, or class participation, remain viable options. However, the subjectivity of such assessment makes it difficult to justify as a large component of students' grades.

Technology is changing the face of education, and the way that we assess students needs to adapt. We shouldn't have to sacrifice academic integrity in the face of new technologies such as ChatGPT, but we do need to be smart about how we adapt teaching and assessment to take account of it. The worst thing that teachers and lecturers could do, would be to try and ignore it and hope that it goes away. ChatGPT and other AI tools aren't going anywhere, their use can't easily be policed, and they are already widely available to (and not doubt already being used by) our students. If we want to ensure that our students are continuing to meet the learning objectives, it is time to kill off the traditional essay. We have other options available to us.