What to Do About Padded Student Essays: My Simple Daily Game Teachers Now Use As a Bell Ringer
I was grading 10th grade argumentative essays at my kitchen table last April, a half-cold bowl of mac and cheese to my left and a half-empty mug of tea to my right, when I hit a paragraph that made me pause. It read: “In today’s modern world that we live in, social media has become an increasingly ubiquitous part of the everyday lives of people all across the globe, especially young people who are growing up surrounded by digital technology that shapes how they think and interact with one another on a daily basis.” Three full paragraphs in, and the student still hadn’t stated their actual thesis. They hadn’t said whether they thought social media helped or harmed teen mental health—they’d just filled space.
By the end of that grading session, I’d counted 17 out of 32 essays that were at least 40% padding. Most of it was obvious fluff, added to hit the 1000-word minimum requirement I’d set. When I asked one student about it after class, he shrugged and said, “The AI said I was 200 words short. It added all that stuff. I didn’t feel like cutting it.”
That made sense. Kids are still learning how to use new tools, not replace their own thinking. Banning AI didn’t work—kids were just going to use it anyway, and I’d rather they learn to use it well than hide it. And the problem wasn’t just new AI tools, anyway. I’d been reading padded essays written by hand long before any of this existed. Kids think longer is better, that big empty words make them sound smarter, that filling space counts as meeting the requirement.
My bell ringers at the time were boring, repetitive grammar worksheets that most kids completed while half-asleep, scrolling their phones under their desks. I needed something that would wake them up, and teach the skill I actually wanted them to learn: how to spot fluff and cut it. So I made a game, on a lark.
Every day, I post one anonymized padded paragraph (pulled from recent student submissions, no names attached) on the board at the start of class. The rules are simple: you have 5 minutes to cut at least 50% of the words, and keep every bit of the original meaning. At the end of 5 minutes, 2 or 3 volunteers share their edited versions, the class votes on the tightest, most accurate version, and the winner gets a $1 candy bar from the vending machine or a free pass on one night’s homework. Low stakes, no grades on the line.
The first day I tried it, I posted that social media paragraph. It was 128 words. The assignment said cut it to 64 words or less, keep the core point. The winning version? “Social media is a core part of modern teens’ daily lives.” Twelve words. The whole class laughed. No one could believe that all that extra text didn’t add a single thing to the point.
Within a month, I noticed a shift. Kids started cutting fluff from their own essays before they turned them in. They’d joke in the margins, “I already cut this to 50%, don’t make me do it again.” I posted the first week of slides to our district’s teacher Facebook group, just a casual share, saying this weird little game was working for me, help yourself. Within two weeks, dozens of teachers were using it.
History teachers use it to edit fluff out of document-based question responses. Biology teachers use it for lab report conclusions. Last month, a high school math teacher told me she uses it to get kids to cut wordy explanations of problem-solving steps, so they learn to be clear and specific. It’s not just for high school, either—elementary teachers have adapted it for 5th grade writing assignments, cutting one long sentence down to its core.
What I didn’t expect was how useful this is for parents, too. My own 12-year-old came home panicking last month about a history research paper. He’d written 800 words, needed 1000, and had no idea what else to add. Instead of telling him to add more facts, I challenged him to cut 100 words of fluff from what he already had. We sat at the kitchen counter for 10 minutes, and he crossed out lines like “This is a very important topic that many people study” and “Abraham Lincoln was one of the most famous presidents in United States history.” After cutting 120 words, he remembered he’d left out a specific quote from the Gettysburg Address that supported his point, added that, and ended up right at 1000 words with zero extra padding.
This isn’t a fix for all writing-related classroom problems. I still get fully generated essays turned in, I still spend time talking about academic honesty, and there are some kids who’d rather turn in padded work than put in the effort to edit. But it shifts the conversation from “cheating is bad” to “editing is a skill you can practice.” Instead of spending hours hunting for unoriginal text, we’re spending 5 minutes a day building a skill that kids will use for everything from college essays to work emails.
For teachers who want to try it, it’s almost no prep. You don’t need a fancy slide deck or any training. Just pull one padded paragraph from your last set of student papers each week, anonymize it, and you’re set. For parents, next time your kid is stressing about hitting a word count, skip the lecture on adding more detail and start with cutting the fluff. More often than not, the good stuff is already there, buried under a pile of empty words.
Right now, the shared slide deck we’ve built has over 200 paragraphs from teachers across the country, from every subject. I add one new paragraph a week. Some weeks the winning cuts surprise me, some weeks they’re exactly what I expected. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s the best thing I’ve tried this year. We’ll see where it goes.
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