Death of the Essay
Dr Gurnam Singh
Associate Prof of Sociology (Hon), University of Warwick. Scholar activist interested in culture and resistance, religion and belief, complexity and ecology, coloniality and racism, critical pedagogy, and technology.
Artificial technology has advanced to a stage where we now have AI tools that are able to produce ‘high-quality essays with minimal human input'. As reported in the Guardian (15th Jan 2023, "ChatGPT, the latest chatbot from OpenAI, founded in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others, has only been publicly available for a matter of weeks, but has already triggered concerns about the potential for hard-to-detect plagiarism and questions about the validity of the essay as a future form of assessment."
Give that the essay has been a permanent feature of most academic courses, especially in the humanities, arts and social sciences, this is a good example of disruptive technology.?The ramifications of this new capacity of AI to produce seemingly ‘original’ and ‘quality’ writing go much further than academia but, for all professions where writing is a central function. Quite simply, they are possibly facing an existential crisis. Indeed, in an age where AI is capable of producing 'original' art in many forms, visual, auditory and written, one does wonder if the whole concept of culture and cultural production and intellectual property needs radically rethinking.?
In the comming years, we are likely to see AI applications, such as ChatGPT, making significant inroads into all graduate jobs that conbtain a significant element that requires high levels of intellectual skills. This shift will have a big impact on higher education and the kinds of academic capabilitites that will be deemed to be relevent for the AI age.
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In terms of academia, for many years, even before the assault of AI, mostly from an inclusion perspective, I have been arguing against traditional forms of assessment centred on the exam and essay. What we need is a radical shift away from such individualistic forms of assessment that largely test memory, capacity to perform under certain conditions and ability to reproduce written material according to a formula.?
What such forms do less well is help the development and testing of the wide range of skills that todays graduate needs in a world of work where knowledge and certain skills have a short shelf life.?This means moving towards?forms of assessment, such as oral exams, dialogic, problem and group based assessment, peer assessment, podcasts, blogs, tweets, photo-elicitation. Moreover, we needs to promote critical reflective writing, which is much more difficult to produce through AI and arguably much more useful than the essay.
Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Partnership Research and Empowerment of Vulnerable youth | Associate Vice-Rector, Relations with Indigenous People | University Professor | Social Worker | Ethicist
2 年So true. We should set up a community of practice where we can exchange ideas and discuss innovative ways to assess in social work and other helping professions. The other point to consider when developing/revisiting strategies is our work load and the time and energy assessment is taking. I always find innovative assessment to lighten the workload as it is also stilulating to mark. I personally try to stay away from typical essays and exams - in fact, Gurnam, I am still using the poster /podcast assessment strategy with reflective paper you had proposed with Stephen (was it for thee module inequalities in social work ?)- I use it to assess my students in my Emancipatory practice module- and it works really well. Students appreciate having a different forms of assessment and often say that it is their most stimulating assessment they had to do in their entire program!