Don't Outsource Your Homework to Robots

One of the loveliest presents that I received for Christmas was a little model dragon holding a pencil.  According to the box, this model of dragon was called ‘Scribbles’, but PDB11 and I quickly agreed that it needed to be a name beginning with G – Gremlin?  Gizmo? – and settled on Grogu, because, as PDB11 said, he looks very like a baby version of Yoda.

It had to be a name beginning with G because, even more than he resembles the young alien hero of The Mandalorian, our Grogu resembles Gadzooks, a dragon in the Last Dragon Chronicles by Chris d’Lacey, in which all dragons have names beginning with G.  Gadzooks is a dragon who has the power to inspire writers, usually by writing a one-word hint like ‘Snigger’ or ‘Nutbeast’.  So far, I haven’t seen Grogu writing anything, but maybe we don’t have enough of a trust-bond yet, or maybe he just doesn’t think I need the help.

What dragons generally don’t do, even in fantasy novels, is write your entire homework essay for you.  However, there are plenty of other options, from asking a stranger on the internet to do your homework for you to getting a robot to do it.

A few months ago, I joined the question-and-answer website Quora.  I soon found that among the questions that typically landed in my in-box were numerous homework-essay questions, such as

 

From the poem, "I Am an African Child", what are the phrases/lines that appeal to the sense of sight, hearing, touch/feeling, taste, and smell?

 

I wrote a reply beginning as follows:

 

Your teacher asked YOU to answer this question, because they want YOU to learn. When teachers ask you an arithmetic question, they want you to work out how to solve the arithmetic problem, and when they ask you a question about a poem, they want to see whether you can read a poem, think about its meaning, and respond to it, without having to ask an adult what the ‘right’ answer is supposed to be…

 

You can read my whole answer here:

 

Since humans like me can be notoriously recalcitrant about being asked to do someone else’s homework for them, schoolchildren are increasingly asking robots to do it instead.  This week, it was reported that schools in some parts of America are banning children from using the chatbot ChatGPT, out of fears that children could use it to write their homework essays.  In practice, however, as long as the chatbot writes fluent English, there is no easy way to prove when students are using it.

Not only that, but teachers are using it to assess essays.  In an essay in the New York Times entitled ‘Don’t Ban ChatGPT in Schools. Teach With It,’ Kevin Roose reports that:

 

One high school teacher told me that he used ChatGPT to evaluate a few of his students’ papers, and that the app had provided more detailed and useful feedback on them than he would have, in a tiny fraction of the time.

“Am I even necessary now?” he asked me, only half joking.

A report in New Scientist even referred to Aakash Chowkase at the University of California, Berkely, having ‘explored using the AI to… write letters of recommendation.’  If I were applying for a job or university place and asking a teacher for a reference, I would hate to think that the reference was written, not by someone who knows me personally and can describe what I am like as a person, but by a machine simply putting together appropriate-sounding phrases.

So, if robots can replace both pupils and teachers in a school relationship, what is the point of schools?  Or, to put it another way: what has gone wrong with schools to make them a place where the aim is not for children to learn to think and understand new concepts, but for them to complete arbitrary tasks like ‘write an essay’ by whatever means they can? 

Modern technology is not the problem here.  It is simply a tool in achieving what has come to seem like the goal of education: to get the maximum number of good grades and qualifications while doing the minimum amount of actual learning necessary.

There are ways around pupils outsourcing their homework to chatbots, Quora, or articles downloaded off the internet (or copied out of books, for that matter).  Schools could abolish homework essays.  Abolishing homework altogether for primary-school children, except a small amount of practice (such as practising reading aloud or playing a musical instrument) would be a good start.  Give them time to play and explore and develop their own interests, and to read books or write poems or build an ant-farm because they want to, not because it’s for a school project!

For secondary-school pupils, perhaps, instead of work to take home with you, there should be a short period of supervised prep in school in which to do written assignments without internet access (other than at times where teachers specifically want pupils to research something on the internet, obviously).  Non-disabled pupils could be required to do these by hand, and disabled pupils provided only with the technology necessary to type an essay, without internet access.

As someone who didn’t enjoy doing time-constrained written assignments like exams (not because I wanted to copy my answers from books, but just because I wanted more time to think about the questions, instead of having to churn out four essays in three hours), I admit that I wouldn’t have enjoyed this.  Also, as the child of a teacher who got tired just from standard teaching, essay-marking and lesson-planning duties, I am certainly not advocating increasing teachers’ working hours, so making it the teachers’ job to supervise essay-writing would need to involve hiring more teachers.

However, it would have some advantages.  It would be a leveller between children from different backgrounds: those who have a quiet and private room in which to study and those who don’t; those whose parents encourage them to study and those whose parents think school is a waste of time; those who are used to relying on their own minds and those whose parents try too hard to ‘help’ and can end up feeding them a lot of the essay without meaning to.

It would also provide the relief of a clear cut-off point: the school day is longer because it includes silent writing sessions as well as classroom discussions, but when you get out at 5 or whenever, and when it’s a weekend, school is over.  You can hang out with your friends, go for a bike ride, go to Scouts or a drama rehearsal, or do a part-time job, without having to worry that you ought to be spending more time studying.  If you are interested in learning more, you read around your subject (maybe reading some plays by Aristophanes will give you a better understanding of attitudes to gender in 5^th century BC Athens) rather than just reading what you need to complete the assignment.

Alternatively, perhaps there should just be less emphasis on compulsory academic, essay-writing based subjects for everyone.  Students who are actually interested in learning about history, literature or philosophy ought to want to develop their ideas about these things (though if they are overloaded with too many demands for essays, it’s easy for them to get fed up and seek short cuts).  But practical, hands-on students who want to study vocational subjects are the most likely to be put off by being expected to spend much of their time writing essays about what they are doing, instead of doing it.

Employers constantly complain that too much of education is based around essay-writing rather than learning practical skills.  Again, this isn’t new.  Twenty years ago, when I spent my summer holidays at archaeology camps, I remember the experienced archaeologists there complaining about students who have spent much more of their time in lectures than actually digging holes, and who fail to recognise valuable Samian pottery, assume that it’s so even that it must be modern, and chuck it on the spoil heap.

I am not a teacher, and not a current student, so I am not the best-informed person to be discussing all this.  But even I can see that when both writing essays and marking them can be outsourced to a robot that doesn’t know or understand anything about the subject, we need to rethink what education is for.