In the fall semester, the English department required written assessments to be completed in class. Now, as the department returns to its previous policy—where students complete both in-class and at-home assessments—both students and faculty are evaluating the effectiveness of the first-semester approach.
In the second semester, students are now given the chance to work on their writing assignments at home. The first-semester policy change was introduced for every English class except the three electives: UL Creative Writing, UL Contemporary Literature and Art in Conversation and UL Philosophy and Literature.
In September, English Department Chair Katherine Dunbar told the Bit that the department introduced the policy to curb increasing AI use on writing assignments. But Dunbar now said that AI was only a small part of the reason for the change. “AI is part of it, but it was not an anti-AI project,” Dunbar said. “It’s always been talked about as a bigger project than just battling AI.”
English teacher Laura Halperin said one main reason for the policy was to improve students’ writing skills. “So the intent was, first semester, to really focus on the craft of writing,” Halperin said. “It was helping students develop their own voice [and] giving students more feedback, which is much easier to do when everyone’s writing at school.”
Dunbar said her statement in September may have been a lapse in judgment. “It may have been a moment of pulling a thread that is one thread and doesn’t represent everything,” Dunbar said.
According to Dunbar, the two main reasons for the policy were to help students improve the quality of their writing and to prevent students from becoming distracted when completing assignments from home.
“It wasn’t a policy in response to our terror of AI,” Dunbar said. “It was that now students are distracted by all kinds of outside forces [when they’re at home], especially their phones.”
But students seem to believe that AI was the main reason for the policy change, and senior Alec Donath said he understood how take-home assignments could tempt students into using AI.
Sophomore Brendon Chu also believed that AI was the main reason for the policy change because he’d read Dunbar’s original statements in September in the previous Bit article. Chu said he’s only heard of students using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot and Grammarly to summarize chapters of books in preparation for class. But Chu said that in his World History class, and in his history class last year, he’s seen firsthand that students use AI on their essays and other written assessments.
Senior Andrew Bennett said the policy harmed some students who can’t work well under time constraints. “There are a lot of people who can go into an English class, 70 minutes, sit down and write a quality essay, and there are a lot of people who cannot,” Bennett said.
On the other hand, senior Paul Smith said he liked the first-semester English policy. He said that he found in-class assessments easier because they took much less time than writing a paper at home. Smith also said the policy leveled the playing field when it came to writing assignments because it ensured that other students weren’t able to cheat using AI.
Halperin said the quality of her students’ writing in the fall semester was similar to the quality of their writing last year. But Halperin said some students thanked her for the policy change because they saw their work improve despite decreased writing time on assessments.
According to Halperin, it is important that students learn how to work under time constraints. She also warned that students who spend too much time working on their papers can develop unproductive perfectionist tendencies. “Just because we have more time doesn’t necessarily make something better,” Halperin said.
Junior James Fitzgibbons agreed with Halperin, saying that learning to work with time constraints is beneficial for students. However, he said that while important, in-class assessments shouldn’t have been the only type of major assessment students were evaluated on in the fall semester because the first-semester policy “isn’t really that fair to people who don’t write well in class.”
Senior Charlotte Glendinning said learning how to complete in-class assessments is an important skill. But she also said she enjoyed writing essays at home, and that the policy is “ineffective at stopping the cheating that it is trying to prevent.” Glendinning said she has seen students hiding notes in their books in the proctoring room or even exiting Digiexam, a testing site, and looking up information before going back into the essay.
“I’ve seen people come into the proctoring room with notes, and I’ve heard people talking about how they are cheating,” Glendinning said. “There are many more opportunities to cheat than I think teachers think.”
Donath said the old policy, where students write assignments in class and at home, works best. He said the first-semester policy prevented him from doing his best work on his assignments. “I wasn’t able to get the English experience I have had in other years, which was very good,” Donath said.
Jacob Blane contributed reporting.