For decades, professors have complained about the futility of requiring students to write semester papers, also known as research papers. Theoretically, research papers teach students how to collect a lot of information, weigh contradictory explanations, and propose their own ideas on the subject while honing their writing skills.
But the reality is very different. Prose is often terrible, and the idea is bad re-debate of class lectures. Rating these papers is pure torture. Interestingly, I heard a lot of people say that evaluating papers is the worst part of teaching. If Dante knew the rating, he would add a new Hell circle, the damn circle had to make a bad paper one by one to make it eternal.
Now we have AI or “artificial intelligence” in the form of Chatgpt, Grok, Gemini and many other platforms. Submit the tips, these programs spit out an article, and it is actually not bad, except for the occasional hallucination. Syntax errors are rare; there is a paper, evidence and organization.
Worse, in K-12 and advanced ED, using AI for homework is rampant. As James D. Walsh said New York Magazine article: “Everyone cheats in college.” And it’s almost impossible to catch a liar, especially now, often marked by AI papers, robotic prose, which can be masked by programs that hopefully “unlock truly human-like AI texts.”
what to do? If you have large courses, it is impractical to conduct interviews with students about their papers to make sure they don’t use AI and randomly selecting student interviews can lead to bias. Furthermore, the suspicion of everyone’s stolen damages the class atmosphere.
Many people return to handwriting exams and class writing assignments. But rating a bunch of blue books is as boring as a bunch of papers.
My solution is to replace the final research paper with a creative project.
I did not have detailed tips or instructions, but gave my students a wide latitude, as the phrase did. Despite this, I still set some parameters. They had to tell me what they thought a few weeks in advance. They can’t take a piece of paper, draw a line on it, and say, “Look: I’m right village. ”
I only have two tough rules: The project must reflect a kind-hearted effort to explain what we read in the classroom, and they must briefly describe the work they are trying to accomplish. For those willing (mostly), students present their programs to the class during the assigned final exam. Apart from that, they have to do what they want to do, and I have got amazing results.
When I taught terrorism literature, a student happened to be going to New York for spring break, so she went to the September 11 memorial and interviewed people. Another student creates a rock opera based on Thomas Kyd’s Elizabelthan Play Spanish tragedy. A group used the university’s stage to load docks to bring together King Lear’s insect elements on the wastelands to perform. I got rap, short stories, children’s books, performances and writing, musical works and paintings.
For example, a student made this project for my previous Shakespeare course (replicated with student permission):
Created by Teresa Cousillas Lema
This pencil drawing represents students’ response to Al Pacino’s “Not Jewish” speech in Michael Radford’s 2004 film Venetian businessman. These three images represent the different emotions Sherlock showed during the speech: anger, sadness, determination.
For background, this student wrote Sherlock’s speech, thus remembering it (she told me). But the project represents more than a beautiful picture: it shows a profound response to Shakespeare’s words and Pacino’s delivery.
The project accomplishes nearly the same goal that the semester paper should achieve: reflect on the material and respond emotionally and intellectually to the script. In the final return, although most students forget their semester papers a few seconds after submission, I guess this student will remember this and give a deep appreciation to Shakespeare.
Of course, switching to a creative project doesn’t completely eliminate the possibility of cheating with AI. If students want to make anything involving writing (e.g., scripts or short stories), or for visual projects, they can use an AI art generator, and they can still resort to AI. But the opportunity to create something they invest in, rather than responding to the professor’s thesis topic, reduces the motivation to not do the work. This project is for students want to Do it instead of them have Do.
However, something is lost. When creative projects replace research papers, students will not have experience in categorizing through multiple and contradictory explanations. They do not understand the different approaches of literary theory and literary methods. They don’t learn how to write key prose.
In short, in my subject, replacing a research paper with a creative project means teaching from a literary critic who teaches English, which is not small. This means repositioning majors in undergraduate English majors rather than preparing graduate school for our best students, and introducing more to historically informed reactions.
Nevertheless, it doesn’t make sense to continue using the evaluation method, and almost everyone agrees to lose value. So I suggest giving up another approach, not only achieving nearly the same goal, but ultimately bringing joy to students and teachers.
