By itself, the essay that is written isn't the goal. One doesn't make students write essays just for the sake of writing essays. Instead, essays are intended

By itself, the essay that is written isn't the goal. One doesn't make students write essays just for the sake of writing essays. Instead, essays are intended as a measure of three other skills - the ability to write, the ability to synthesize knowledge, and lastly, the general structure of the knowledge. The ability to write - and write clearly - is an important skill that if one reads Reddit posts or Stack Overflow questions enough you can see where it is lacking. It is important to write in a way that provides the information to other humans. Using correct grammar, complete sentences, and proper vocabulary. Likewise, writing up a bug report isn't something that you can ask GPT to do for you. I will rail about poorly written Jira titles and descriptions that fail to have the necessary information presented clearly... and comments that aren't helpful either. I've been given a set of products and instructed to write up a comparison grid for how well I expect the product to be able to fulfill a certain requirement. This is done by going out and reading the product specifications and features, and a few customer issues to see what problems people have with them. The difference between that and the world history question back in high school on "compare and contrast the political structure of two countries on opposite sides of WWII" and needing to go into the library and look up information beyond what the history book had in it is not that significant; rather its the same set of skills. And finally, the general structure of the knowledge from high school. Understanding the international political tensions that are in the news is something that has its foundations in world history class. What was the Great Game? When did India get its independence? What happened with the collapse of the Soviet Union (that was actually current events rather than history at the time)? How did yellow journalism impact the Spanish American war, and what parallels does that have in today's media? Being ignorant of the past 200 years of American (or whatever nation you are reading this from ... and for that matter, the history of civilization going back another few thousand years) leads to a myopic and self centered view of the world today. The lack of this understanding is in turn leading to an increase in nationalism and the increased strife that that brings. So yes, cheating on high school world history with GPT is a problem. Beyond not learning how to put one's own thoughts to text it is also missing out on all of the practice of the process of learning and the background information for the world that we live in.