Will ChatGPT end the take-home essay?

Within a week of ChatGPT's release, teachers have been running their own assignments through it, and many do not like what they see. The Guardian reports academics saying some of its exam answers would earn full marks from an undergraduate. Dan Gillmor, who teaches journalism at Arizona State University, gave it one of his student assignments, a letter of online safety advice to a relative, and said he would have given it a good grade. His verdict was blunt: "Academia has some very serious issues to confront."

In The Atlantic, writer Stephen Marche has called the college essay dead, and high-school English teacher Daniel Herman has written about the end of high-school English. Those are strong claims. To decide how far they hold, it helps to separate two things an essay does.

Two jobs an essay does

A take-home essay has always done two jobs at once. It is a product a teacher can grade, and a process through which the student learns to research, organize and argue. ChatGPT breaks the first job far more than the second.

As a product, the essay is now cheap. ChatGPT is free, it writes fluent paragraphs on almost any topic, and every request produces fresh text rather than copied text, so a plagiarism checker that looks for matching passages has nothing to match. Teachers have no widely available tool that reliably tells its writing apart from a student's.

As a process, the essay is untouched. A student who outsources the writing skips exactly the part that builds the skill. The task for teachers is to make that process visible again.

It also helps to know the tool's weak spots. OpenAI says ChatGPT can write answers that sound right but are wrong, and testers have caught it stating simple geography facts incorrectly. Its essays tend to be general, tidy and thin on specifics. Those weaknesses are clues, not proof, but they suggest where good assignments can push.

A worked assignment redesign

Here is a standard assignment, then the same learning goal rebuilt for a class where every student can reach ChatGPT at home.

Before: Write a 1,200-word essay on the causes of the First World War. Due in two weeks.

After:

Nothing here forbids ChatGPT. A student could use it at stage 4 to tighten a paragraph. But most of the grade now rests on work that happens in front of the teacher, on assigned sources the chatbot has not read, and on a conversation in which the student has to show they understand their own argument.

Another option is to bring the tool into the room. Ask ChatGPT a question from the unit in class, project its answer, and have students find the errors, the vague claims and the missing evidence.

Write a 300-word answer for a grade 10 history class: What were the main causes of the First World War?

Students mark up the result: which claims need a source, what is too general, what they would add from the documents you assigned. They learn the content and learn to read machine-written text critically at the same time.

How can teachers respond this term?

Start with what you can change before the holidays or for the first assignments in January. Move at least one key piece of writing into class time, even a short timed draft, so you have a sample of each student's own voice to compare with later work. Add a brief oral check, a few minutes per student, to any major take-home essay. Grade the steps, not only the final file: proposals, notes and drafts with visible changes.

Talk to students directly. Tell them you know ChatGPT exists, explain what you will and will not accept, and why the writing process matters for what they are learning. A clear rule announced in advance works better than suspicion after the fact. Many schools have no policy yet, so a sentence in your course outline is worth adding now.

Finally, try the tool yourself before forming a view. Run your own prompts through it, see where it is strong and where it stumbles, and share what you find with colleagues. The take-home essay as a pure product test may be over, but the reasons we ask students to write are not.