What To Do About AI-Padded Student Essays: My 5-Minute Daily Cutting Game That Works As A Bell Ringer
I was sitting at my kitchen table grading 11th grade argumentative essays last December, a cold fry from my kid’s leftover dinner next to my laptop, when I hit the third padded essay that week. The prompt was simple: Should our district push high school start times back one hour? The opening paragraph ran 168 words, and didn’t say a single concrete thing. “In modern society, teens across the country face a wide range of challenges that impact their ability to learn and grow every single school day. One of the most talked about challenges in educational communities today revolves around what time school should start each morning, a question that affects every student, teacher, and parent in the district.” And on it went. By the time the writer got to the actual point, I’d already forgotten what I was reading.
I wasn’t mad at the student. I’d had this conversation enough times by then: “I needed 750 words, miss, and that’s just what the tool spit out.” Kids aren’t trying to cheat, most of the time. They’re trying to hit an arbitrary word count, and AI makes it dead simple to add 200 words of fluff in 10 seconds. But that doesn’t change the fact that I was grading a pile of essays full of words that didn’t earn their place, and my usual line about “be more concise” wasn’t working. I’d been saying that for years, and kids still thought longer equaled better.
So I messed around and made a little game for the start of class. Bell ringers are supposed to be 5 minutes, low-prep, get kids settled before the lesson. I pulled that 168-word opening paragraph, anonymized it, put it on the whiteboard. The rule was simple: Cut this down to no more than 50 words, and keep every single main point the original is trying to make. First table done correctly gets to pick the background music for our free work period on Friday.
The first day, kids complained. “Why are we cutting words instead of writing them?” Jake called from the back row. I told him “Because good writing isn’t about piling on words to hit a number. It’s about making sure every word you leave in matters.” They grumbled and got to work. It took three minutes for a table to get it down to 41 words: “Our district should push high school start times back one hour to match teen sleep needs and improve student learning.” That had every main point, no fluff. I gave them the prize, and we moved on with the lesson.
We did it again the next day, with another padded chunk from an anonymized essay. Within a week, kids were leaning in. They started competing to see who could get it the shortest while still keeping all the meaning. Other teachers heard about it in the lounge. The 10th grade English teacher asked for my bank of excerpts, then the biology teacher started using it to teach concise lab report abstracts—turns out science teachers deal with just as much padding as we do. The social studies teacher adapted it for DBQ conclusions, and now half the department uses it as their daily bell ringer.
What I’ve learned from this isn’t just that it’s fun for kids. It’s that most students never get practice spotting this kind of fluff. For years, we’ve assigned word counts and graded longer essays more leniently, so kids learn to pad whether they’re using AI or not. AI just made the problem visible, because it’s so good at generating generic filler that sounds official but means nothing. This game doesn’t require any fancy curriculum, or any big fight over whether kids should be using AI to draft. It just gives them five minutes of daily practice looking at text and asking one simple question: Does this word need to be here?
It’s also adaptable for parents working with kids at home. You don’t need to be an English teacher to play this. If your kid is prepping a college essay or a high school research paper, after they finish a first draft, pull the opening paragraph, and ask them to tell you the main point they want that paragraph to make. Then challenge them to cut half the words without losing that point. It’s way more effective than saying “this is too wordy” and handing it back to them. It turns editing from a criticism into a small, winnable game.
After three months of doing this every day, I’ve seen a noticeable difference in the essays my students turn in. They catch the filler before they hand it to me. Last month, one of my students told me he now deletes the generic opening paragraph AI generates automatically, before he even starts adding his own points. He said he just knows it’s all garbage now.
It’s not a perfect fix. I still get padded essays every week, and there’s still a lot of work to do to help kids write clear, meaningful prose. We don’t have all the answers, and I don’t think this game solves all the problems that come with new writing tools. Some kids still struggle to tell the difference between helpful context and unnecessary filler, and that’s okay—practice adds up over time. But five minutes a day of cutting fluff is way more effective than any 45-minute lecture I’ve ever given on conciseness. Sometimes the problems that make us panic the most don’t need big, expensive overhauls. They just need a low-stakes, five-minute activity to get kids practicing the skill they actually need.
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