There's several purposes for these highly structured writing assignments. 1. What is the student's reading comprehension. Did they understand the reading assi

There's several purposes for these highly structured writing assignments. 1. What is the student's reading comprehension. Did they understand the reading assignments and lectures. 2. What is the student's writing skill. Is it free of grammar, spelling mistakes, and is it clear and comprehensible. 3. Can the student follow instructions. Did they carefully read the prompt and directly address all points of the prompt. Reading comprehension can be largely offloaded or doublechecked with cliff notes, youtube videos, or just bugging your classmates for their notes. Writing skill can be largely tool driven with spell check, grammar check, and the new NLP tools like grammarly or hemingway. This largely leaves modern college essays to testing bullet point 3, did the student fully address the prompt in the manner the teacher specified. In my undisclosed observations this is the primary point reduction in college writing that causes a student to not have an A. This is also the exact type of thing the substack suggests can be offhanded to GPT-3, what makes college writing awful for the college students. If this is the case, are we going to build anti-GPT3 techniques such as have students write in a controller lab setting? Are we going to accept that a certain number of submissions will be machine-enhanced and let grade inflation continue? Are we going to accept that modern college essays might be more an exercise in editing machine output than generating new text? The best math classes accepted the invention of the calculator, the computer, and use them as tools to teach even more math.