From the Atlantic:

The College Essay is Dead.

As usual with this kind of hyperventilated "disruption" rhetoric, I dissent from the hyperbole.

I looked at that essay and the immediate words that popped into my head were "fluff" and "filler." The grammar was fine, if a bit stilted. Granted, I haven't looked at the rest of the hyperlinked essay.

This program will be a boon to mediocre students, not good ones (unless they're really time pressed ). AI essays won't get you into Stanford. Where the essay will die or diminish is at minimally selective places, but I suspect at most of those places the essay gets little to no weight anyway.

And it's perfectly OK to ditch the silly essay anyway. There are better ways to assess both character and writing ability.

Of course, the article is not really about the college essay.

This encapsulates much of my experience in academe over the past 35 years ... especially the last two sentence.

quote:

As the technologists have ignored humanistic questions to their peril, the humanists have greeted the technological revolutions of the past 50 years by committing soft suicide. As of 2017, the number of English majors had nearly halved since the 1990s. History enrollments have declined by 45 percent since 2007 alone. Needless to say, humanists’ understanding of technology is partial at best. The state of digital humanities is always several categories of obsolescence behind, which is inevitable. (Nobody expects them to teach via Instagram Stories.) But more crucially, the humanities have not fundamentally changed their approach in decades, despite technology altering the entire world around them. They are still exploding meta-narratives like it’s 1979, an exercise in self-defeat

English and History departments are over-stuffed with increasingly superannuated professors professing to tiny classes, while computer science and data science programs teach to over-stuffed 100+ student classes while threatening to secede and form their own "schools." [psst: this is now actually happening at my university].

My department is well along in getting reclassified by the state as STEM. Why? Because we are, and have been for the last 40 years. Because that sends the correct signal to students who might want to major in a "technical" or "quantitative" social science that teaches them another form of "data science." And because it helps our foreign students decide to major in economics (which they often prefer) over computer science because they can then stay in the US more easily upon graduating.

I played around with this along with my son. He entered in an exam essay prompt from a history course he took. The prompt was something along the lines of: "Explain how the rise in power of some guy in Europe in the 1950s had its roots in Genghis Khan's rule."

What the AI produced was a lovely if bland essay talking about the guy, Europe in the 1950s, and Genghis Khan. No connective tissue. It totally failed on the standard "compare and contrast" essay that comprises most exam short answer / essay questions.

quote:

Originally posted by Nina: It totally failed on the standard "compare and contrast" essay that comprises most exam short answer / essay questions.

No fear! The software will improve.