In my Kansas college courses, writing feels like a digital zombie footrace
Dealing with AI-fueled writing has created new challenges for college instructors, writes our columnist. (Eric Thomas illustration / Kansas Reflector)
As a middle-aged instructor at the front of a college lecture hall, I feel like a pivot point — a human crossroads around which academic writing has shifted, yet again.
That’s a big thesis.
Let me explain.
In college courses, we educators have a few standard assignment types. There’s the multiple-choice exam, whether on mimeographed paper, Scantron answer sheets or an online exam.
There’s the group project, the titanic, looming assignment that everyone loves to hate.
And then there is the writing assignment. Maybe it’s a literary interpretation of a Shakespeare sonnet. Or a research paper about the formation of sedimentary rocks. Or an essay comparing communism with socialism.
Happily, I confess my love for slogging away at academic writing. (Maybe that’s why I sit before you at 11:38 p.m. writing this column as my side gig.)
During my senior year of high school, the writing bug bit me hard. My teacher invited us to choose a topic — any topic — and spend weeks writing a research paper. Requirement: it had to be longer than 10 pages. (God bless you, Mr. Parr, and your grading stamina.)
I found myself, two months later, on the floor of my Midwestern basement at 2 a.m. with index cards spread around me, each scrap of paper a detail about the Watts Riots of 1965.
Facts pulled from microfilm at the local library. Anecdotes from Life Magazine. Quotes from historians. I shuffled and sorted and stacked the cards endlessly until they added up to an 18-page research paper.
By the end, I was dazzled by what I had learned (if not my grade from the imposing Mr. Parr). That kind of research and writing defined the next four years of college for me as well: Dive in and figure out something novel to say about, well, whatever was assigned.
The pursuit that I found in many of those assignments fuels my nostalgia today. I fear we are watching the experience of academic writing being shrugged off by artificial intelligence.
Before we get to that, let’s rewind.
There are three generations of academic writers alive today, in my thinking. I’m not talking about Boomers and Gen Xers and Millennials. These cohorts are based on what writing was like for them in high school and college.
The Linear Marvels
Each generation wonders how the previous one did it. That’s how I feel about the Linear Marvels.
For college students even a few years older than me, the tools were elegantly simple: their notes, a typewriter and paper.
How did they marshal their facts so orderly and calmly? How did they start their writing at the beginning, continue toward the middle and finish with an ending? No cursor-ing up and down through shambling sentences. No repairing broken logic. No parachuting a paragraph into a new location.
It’s beyond me how the Linear Marvels did it. I could more easily pick a lock with a water balloon.
The Cutters-and-Pasters
By the time I did any kind of ambitious writing, word processors queued up in columns in high school and college classrooms. These machines allowed us to move backward and forward in what we hoped to write, fixing our errors and inserting examples that we omitted.
Soon, software and desktop computers allowed us to see an entire essay or research paper on the screen. We scrolled through paragraphs and added footnotes with ease. We meddled with the point size and margins to push the essay to three pages.
Eventually we used the internet — cutting and pasting the perfect quote from an academic journal or literary criticism. While it’s tempting to consider the advent of the internet as a whole new phase in academic writing, we were still doing essentially the same intellectual activity of cobbling together an argument as we had with other sources.
However, it was still fundamentally different from the Linear Marvels — and certainly a different way from my students this semester.
The Un-Assessables
So we arrive at the smash-up of artificial intelligence and academic writing.
If you are a skeptic of artificial intelligence, park your doubt for a moment. Consider the magnitude of change: Within a few years, academic writing in undergraduate classrooms has been scrambled by AI.
My classroom assignments from three years ago are imminently hackable because I gave students time away from class (and away from my supervision) to write. If a college instructor hopes for the student to be the source of the words and ideas on the page in 2025, you can seldom — if ever — let them do the writing outside of class.
It’s simply too easy to ask ChatGPT: “Please generate a 1,000-word essay about Blah-Blah-Blah. Be sure that it has some language errors and diction choices that would be appropriate for an undergraduate student at a mid-sized state university.”
It’s almost folksy to remember a few years ago when students would pay another student — or a web-based service — to provide a completed essay for them. I don’t even need to type a username or password into ChatGPT. It’s happy to give me A-level undergrad work for free.
Providing one of my course’s essay questions to artificial intelligence a few years ago yielded an essay with the sophistication of mashed carrots. Back then, when I tested the prompts on different AI models, factual errors infested the sentences.
“Use AI,” I said to my class, “if you enjoy reading essays that would earn a C- on the exam.”
Students giddily pointed out the AI hallucinations. On the eve of taking the exam, they knew more than AI.
Today, not so much. The AI answers are direct, correct and subtly different each time you ask. There are some funky formatting quirks. For instance, every answer has more headings than a BuzzFeed listicle. Otherwise, the AI content (at least in my subject area) has rapidly improved.
Many of today’s instructors threaten to suss out the AI papers submitted by their students. The reality? These instructors are likely to catch honest writers in their dragnet and alienate them with flimsy accusations of academic dishonesty. Enraged students tell me about honest writing that got flagged by dubious instructors.
If not the out-of-class writing, then what?
Here’s another reliable method, but one soon to be obsolete, that we have used in academia. Perhaps you remember it. The instructor provides students with five different essay prompts but only one of them will appear on the exam.
The educational allure is obvious. Students must research and outline — if not write — five different essays to be prepared for the mystical chosen one on exam day. (“I hope it’s No. 5!”)
AI has broken this option as well. The researching, outline and writing has been replaced by a much more nefarious cut-and-paste. Cut the question. Paste it into AI.
Just memorize the content of five essays. Heave the book out the window. Who needs extraneous details when I can mainline the slender lineup of facts that slays the question?
Where does that leave us? The research paper: gutted. The critical essay: old-fashioned. The randomly chosen in-class essay: obsolete.
No wonder universities are sponsoring AI everything — but especially AI teaching summits to help us figure out what is next for writing within higher education. Assessing students in the age of AI is an increasingly elaborate cat-and-mouse game with instructors scurrying to keep up.
However, it’s vital that we do, because when powered by AI, undergraduate writing will never be the same.
Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.