That New Study About AI and Grades Hit Way Too Close To Home
I’ve been a part-time TA for intro sociology at my local state college for three years now, and last Tuesday I was curled up on my couch grading first unit papers, iced oat latte from the campus cart (the one that charges $5 for extra ice, no refills) balanced on the armrest. Halfway through a paper about grocery access in urban neighborhoods, my phone pinged with an email from my department professor linking that new study everyone’s been quietly talking about — the one that found students are learning less overall but getting higher grades than they were five years ago, and most of the shift tracks back to the new tools everyone’s using. I jumped a little, spilled my latte all over my grading notebook, and spent 10 minutes dabbing at it with paper towels. It felt less like a breaking news alert and more like someone walked in on a messy secret I’d been ignoring for a year.
I had that awkward office hours meeting just last month that keeps popping into my head. A sophomore named Mia came in, red-eyed, because she’d gotten a B- on her midterm essay — the lowest grade she’d gotten all through college, she said, and if her GPA drops below 3.8 she loses her partial scholarship. I asked her to walk me through the argument she made, the one about how systemic redlining created modern food deserts, because the essay was really polished, way more polished than most 20-year-olds’ writing, but I’d had a vague feeling something was off. She stared at her own printed essay for a full 30 seconds, twisting the handle of her reusable hydroflask around and around, and couldn’t explain what the USDA food access tract measure even was. It was in the paper, word for word, but she had no clue what it meant. I didn’t call her out. I just told her we could go over it together after break, and she left as fast as she could. I sat there after the door closed feeling weird, not even mad just… sad, I guess.
I overhear stuff all the time now, little things that add up. Last week I was packing up my stuff after a review session, waiting for the custodian to unlock the next room over, and two freshmen were leaning against the vending machine getting chips. One said he hadn’t actually read a single assigned chapter all semester. He just plugs the prompt in, tweaks the opening and closing a little, turns it in, and he’s got an A- average so far. The other laughed and said yeah, same, she couldn’t even remember what she wrote about for her last bio lab report. No one’s even hiding it that much anymore.
I get it, though. That’s the messy contradiction no one likes to talk about, right? Mia works 25 hours a week at a coffee shop off campus to cover the gap her scholarship doesn’t, she flies home once a month to check on her mom who’s got early stage MS, she’s taking 15 credits to graduate on time. If she has to choose between learning the ins and outs of food access metrics and keeping her scholarship so she can even stay in school, what the hell else is she supposed to do? And for what it’s worth, I’ve done it too. Last semester I had a 10-page literature review due for my own master’s class the same week I had 80 papers to grade and my little sister’s wedding out of state. I used the tool to summarize 12 studies I just didn’t have time to read fully, got an A on the paper, and when I had to present my findings in seminar I fumbled through explaining the core finding of one of the key papers because I only knew the 3-sentence summary the tool spit out. I’m not up here on some high horse judging undergrads. I get why everyone does it.
The study’s findings don’t feel shocking to me, they just feel familiar. Grades were already inflating a little bit every decade anyway, before any of this. Professors get pressured to keep retention up, students fill out those evaluations at the end of the semester that affect whether you get your contract renewed, it’s easier to give a B+ than a C- to a kid who’s already paying 10 grand a year in tuition. This just speeds the whole process up. The tool writes a polished essay that checks all the boxes a professor is grading for, so you give it a good grade, and the kid never had to actually work through the material to write it. Everyone’s happy, at least on the surface. Except the kid’s leaving class without the knowledge they paid for, that’s the part the study points out that no one wants to sit with.
I don’t have some big solution, or some scary take that this is the end of education or whatever. People said the same thing about calculators when I was in elementary school, right? Said kids would never learn to add or multiply on their own. And calculators turned out fine, once people figured out how to teach with them instead of against them. But this feels different, somehow. Calculators don’t do your whole thinking for you before you ever learn the basics. If you want to be a social worker, like Mia does, you’re gonna have to actually go out into a community and figure out what people need, not just write a paper that sounds right. If you want to be a nurse, you can’t just generate a good lab report, you have to actually understand what the results mean when a patient’s asking you.
I wiped the latte off my couch last Tuesday, finished grading the rest of the papers, and ended up giving that really polished paper about food deserts an A-, same as the study says most of us would. It checked all the boxes. I couldn’t have given it a lower grade without just guessing it was generated, and I had no proof. I thought about Mia, about that awkward 30 seconds of silence in my tiny cubicle office, and I still don’t know what the right answer is. There’s no big moral to this, no neat ending. It just is what it is: we’ve got this new thing that makes getting good grades easier than ever, and we’re all just kind of slowly figuring out that the thing students are actually paying for — the learning — is getting left behind more often than not. And most days, I don’t know what anyone’s supposed to do about that. (Word count: 1128)
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