My two cents about this after working with some teachers: this is a cat and mouse game and you're wasting your time trying to catch students writing essays on their own time.
It is better to pivot and not care about the actual content of the essay, but instead seek alternate strategies to encourage learning - such as an oral presentation or a quiz on the knowledge. In the laziest case, just only accept hand-written output - because even if it was generated at least they retained some knowledge by copying it.
Do teachers prefer grading papers or something? This always seemed like the obvious answer and there are no shortage of complaints. There is something making papers "sticky" that I do not understand. Education needs to be agile enough to change it's assessment methods. It's getting to the point where we can't just blame LLMs anymore. Figure out how to asses learning outcomes instead of just insisting on methods that you assumed should work.
Oral exams and quizzes are hard for reasons unrelated to understanding the subject matter. Language barriers, public speaking anxiety, exam stress, etc. All things that students should hopefully learn how to overcome, but that's a lot to ask a teacher to deal with in addition to teaching history or whatever. With a paper, a student can choose their own working environment, choose a day and time when they are best able to focus, have a constructive discussion with the teacher if they're having trouble midway through the work, and spread their effort (if they want to) across more than an hour-long test or 5-minute oral exam. In an imaginary world where they couldn't cheat, a paper gives the teacher the best chance of evaluating whether a student understands the material.
I don't think you're wrong necessarily, but there are good reasons that teachers like papers other than "we've always used them".
> Oral exams and quizzes are hard for reasons unrelated to understanding the subject matter. Language barriers, public speaking anxiety, exam stress, etc
People have some different challenges writing papers and taking oral and written quizzes, but is one way or the other necessarily easier? For writing papers, think about language barriers, anxiety about writing ability, stress of writing papers, need for self-motivation and time management, etc.
Because, assuming it's done properly w/o cheating, it's a great learning tool. It's sometimes easy to forget that certain tasks are the way they are because they're supposed to teach. We don't structure teaching and learning around what the least painful thing is.
>Because, assuming it's done properly w/o cheating
But that's what we are solving for. So you can't assume it.
This is what I mean when I say educators need to be more agile instead of insisting on assessment methods they simply assume should work.
How wide is the gap between “least painful thing” and “most effective thing”?
I think the most realistic way is to do a flipped classroom, where middle-school and beyond, children are expected to be independent learners. Class time should be spent on application of skills and evaluation.
Why do we even grade people? Just teach the content and be done with it. Sure if a student wants to assess their knowledge to see how well they can answer questions they can do that for kicks. If industry wants well educated people, they should have supervised entrance quizes or exams, the onus is on them. This obsession with catching cheaters is out of control.
If you're asking this seriously:
We need to grade people because that's the best way we have to determine (for one or more subjects) who's:
1. capable enough, so that we can promote them to the next stage;
2. improving or has potential for improvement, so that we can give them the tools or motivation to continue;
3. underperforming, so that we can find out why and help them turn it around (or reduce the pressure);
4. actually learning the content, and if not, why not.
Thankfully, everyone knows this system is flawed, so most don't put too much weight on school grades. But overall, the grades are there to provide both an incentive for teachers and students to do better, and a way to compare performance.
All good points, and I was sort of coming at it from the point of view of catching cheaters. ofc cheaters skew the data but theyre ultimately hurting themselves. They wont pass a companies' entrance tests or will soon find themselves unemployed if they cant do the work. Yes its a problem but I see a lot of effort being spent on trying to detect them. Is that effort proportional to the problem?
If computer usage hampers a child's socialization with the group he's learning with, maybe the simplest and most meaningful solution would be preventing children enrolled in language comprehension classes from having access to computers at home particularly at core language and reasoning stages in development.