Think On Your Feet! Exeter Should Increase In-Class Essays

By  SAMUEL ALTMAN ‘26 and JINMIN LEE ‘26

Your pencil trembles as you frantically scribble facts about Otto Von Bismarck in your history in-class writing test. At this point, you don’t even know what your thesis is—or whether you even had one in the first place. Walking out of the classroom, you begin speculating about your grade; hopefully it’s not below a B-. 

Exonians complain when they have a paper due the next day, but complain more when they have an in-class writing assignment. Students shy away from the stressful and messy nature of in-class writing; such assessments do not give enough time to think every argument through and seldom leave a margin of time for embellishments. 

However, English, religion, and history classes should increase the number of in-class assessments. Today, artificial intelligence makes it impossible to judge written work as fully original and makes students rely too much on spelling and grammar software, hindering their long-term writing abilities. Students should also be incentivized to practice their critical thinking abilities under pressure and memorize basic facts, especially in history class. 

In this age of technology, software like ChatGPT is becoming increasingly sophisticated at mimicking human writing. All a student has to do is explain the general emotion or situation that they’re trying to express, and the AI can give a solid paper that would make for a good grade. Of course, if a student directly copy and pasted it, they would likely be discovered for cheating, but it’s easy to simply change up the wording or entirely remove a few sections to make enough reasonable doubt about who wrote it. But, even if the student doesn’t use AI for actually writing the paper, they may still use it simply for idea generation and inspiration, which itself might stunt creative growth in students. If a portion of writing assignments were done in class, of course, any risk of cheating would be absolutely gone.

Another extension of AI is grammar tools (like Grammarly) that automatically correct misspellings and even rewrite entire sentences to improve flow. Nowadays, many of these companies have their own actual “AI” function which does work like ChatGPT, but even the grammar tools can detract from the quality and fairness of Exeter’s education, especially when they’re used at length throughout students’ entire time here. The issue, fundamentally, is that students never have to learn grammar. As long as you have a basic intuition for how sentences are supposed to sound, on every English and history assignment you ever have, you can simply rely on these extensions to ensure you never make any structural errors. Some might answer this by proposing that there’s nothing wrong with this sort of AI, because, in the end, it’s still the student’s work. But firstly, this is a very slippery slope to go down—at what level of AI involvement do we deem that the writing is not of the student? Secondly, crafting sentence structure, understanding sentence flow, and remembering basic spellings have always been a key part of English class. Without these, English classes would be teaching students how to craft a narrative overall, perhaps, but not the basic skills for communication and storytelling that you might use in your everyday lives. In many cases, it’s probably not the end of the world if students use sites that help a little bit with grammar, but as those sites become increasingly developed, it wouldn’t hurt to have a few assignments a term that truly test students on basic English skills.

Additionally, students should sometimes practice critical thinking under pressure. Unfortunately, adults must make challenging and impactful decisions in the real world in a limited time and bear the consequences. Therefore, to teach Exonians how to stay calmer and think on their feet under pressure, classes should test students on forming logical and coherent arguments on the spot. Impromptu thinking distinguishes executives from mere workers. Further, in-class writing is messy; students are forced to optimize and thus forgo some of the points they want to make. Students must sacrifice some ideas to focus on the most important ones. Making a hierarchy of ideas based on importance is essential for any field. 

Finally, an often overlooked aspect of in-class writing is memorization of information, especially in history courses. Oftentimes, students can get by in their classes by only skimming their readings and then diving into the actual content before a paper. This defeats the spirit of Harkness in a lot of classes because many students are simply not prepared and don’t have coherent knowledge of previous texts read, as they never read them thoroughly enough. We’re not necessarily advocating for pop-quizzes, but even an announced in-class writing assignment would ensure that students need to know the content well enough that they can create an argument within a somewhat constrained time frame, instead of taking hours to sift through all of the information they never truly understood (which would also save students’ time). Some students may worry that their grades would systematically drop if this were implemented because in-class writing is harder. To solve this, though, teachers need only to take into account the nature of the assignment and grade accordingly, which could be overseen by the department. 

As technology changes, Exeter has to adapt. Crafting a paper over long periods of time is an important part of our education but this format of in-class writing would aid in maintaining the integrity of our curriculum. In-class writing assignments allow teachers to test students’ true writing abilities in an environment devoid of AI and grammar checkers. Also, students become better critical thinkers and memorize important facts. Although students may hate the pressure in the moment, they will walk away from the class better prepared for life ahead of them.