That New Study About AI and Grades Hit Way Too Close To Home For Me
I saw the headline this morning while I was squished into the campus bus, holding onto a pole and trying not to spill my iced coffee all over the stack of ungraded essays I had balanced on my backpack. I’m a part-time TA for intro sociology, so any headline about students and grades makes me pause. The study said what a lot of us have been whispering for a couple years now: on average, undergrads are getting higher grades than they were five years ago, but they’re retaining less core content, and their critical thinking skills on basic assignments are lower. AI’s the biggest culprit, the researchers said. I didn’t even have to finish reading the whole thing to know they were right. I’ve been watching it happen every week.
Last month I had that awkward run-in with Mia, the freshman who comes to every office hour because she’s terrified of failing out. She’d turned in a draft of her first essay on inequality that was messy, a little disjointed, but you could tell she was actually thinking about it—she’d tied in her own experience working at a fast food place after school, how her manager pays her under the table and doesn’t give breaks. It was raw, and I gave her a B-, wrote a bunch of notes on how to tighten the argument, told her to come back if she needed help. A week later she turned in the final version, and it was flawless. Like, publishable-in-the-undergrad-journal flawless. No typos, perfect structure, cites all the right theorists in exactly the right places. I stared at it for 10 minutes while my microwave popcorn burned in the common room of my apartment. I knew.
When she came in to pick it up, I asked her to walk me through the third argument she made about how intergenerational wealth gaps perpetuate housing segregation. She just stared at her shoes for a minute, then started crying. Said her mom’s insulin co-pay went up that month, she picked up an extra night shift at the diner, she didn’t have three free days to rewrite the essay. She pasted my notes and her draft into that tool everyone uses, and it just… spit out the whole new thing. She didn’t even mean to keep it, she said, she just ran out of time. I didn’t report her. I made her rewrite the body of the essay for half credit, and she ended up with a B+ in the end. I don’t know if that was the right call, honestly. But what was I supposed to do? Fail her out of college because her mom needs medicine?
The thing no one talks about in those stuffy department meetings where we argue about AI policies is that most of these kids aren’t just being lazy. Well, some are, sure. I’ve had kids turn in AI essays that still have the original prompt text in the footer, that’s a thing that actually happens. But a lot of them are just treading water. Tuition went up 15% in the last three years here, most undergrads work at least 20 hours a week just to pay rent and meal plans. When I was an undergrad, I worked 25 hours a week at the campus bookstore, I pulled all nighters, I used SparkNotes to get through novels I didn’t have time to read, I copied a paragraph from Wikipedia once for a 10-point discussion post. This is just the upgraded version. The difference is, SparkNotes just gave you the gist. AI writes the whole assignment for you, makes it good enough to get an A.
Last week I graded the midterm, 50 multiple choice questions on basic concepts we’ve covered since the start of the semester. Half the class couldn’t correctly answer what the Hawthorne effect is. We talked about it for two full class days, it’s in every reading, it was on the printed study guide we handed out. But 70% of that same class has an A- or higher on their essays so far this semester. That’s exactly what the study says: higher grades, less actual learning. I sat in the student union after grading, eating a sad overpriced turkey sandwich, and watched a group of freshmen cramming for a bio quiz. One of them pulled up the lecture recording, dropped it into AI, and asked it to make a one-page study guide. No one took their own notes. No one talked through the concepts together to make sure they got it. They just copied the study guide and started scrolling TikTok. I get it, it’s faster. But do they remember any of it an hour after the quiz? Probably not.
I had a junior come to me two weeks ago, begging for extra credit because he was failing my prof’s upper division class. He needs a C to graduate. All his lower division sociology classes were half-online when he started, then AI got big right as he moved back to full in-person, so almost all of his past essays were AI-written. He told me he’s never actually had to write a full essay from start to finish by himself. When his upper division prof switched to all in-class essays to cut down on AI use, he just… couldn’t do it. He couldn’t organize his thoughts, couldn’t remember the basic theorists, couldn’t even write a clear topic sentence to save his life. He’s four credits away from graduating, and he might not get his degree because he spent four years getting good grades without learning how to do the work. That’s the part that sucks, right? It’s not just that the grades are fake. It’s that the fake grades set you up to fail way later, when it matters even more.
I ran into Mia again this morning, right after I read the study. She was working the front desk at the library, covering a shift for a sick friend. She told me she got a 3.8 last semester, she’s keeping her full scholarship, she’s thinking about adding a sociology minor. I smiled and told her that was really great. I didn’t bring up that first essay. I don’t know what the right answer is here. The study says we’ve got a problem, and it’s right. But it doesn’t ask why kids are turning to AI in the first place. It doesn’t count the rent checks, or the prescription co-pays, or the scholarships that get yanked if your GPA drops below a 3.5. If I was 19 and working 30 hours a week just to stay in school, I’d probably use it too.
I don’t have a neat solution to wrap this up with. I just keep grading the perfect essays, and grading the messy multiple choice midterms where half the class gets the easiest questions wrong, and I wonder what we’re actually doing here, handing out all these good grades for less and less actual learning.
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