When I think of the scads of papers I wrote as an undergrad, I recall hunkering down in my dorm room, alone with my laptop and books. Only my Shakespeare professor took a different approach: she had us write (by hand, in blue books) timed essay exams instead of take-home paper assignments. Although these essays, written in a single draft, were less meaningful to me than those I labored over at length, I appreciated that this professor’s approach left me with a bit less homework—and a bit less stress.

In-class writing can run the gamut: higher-stakes essay exams, minute papers scored on completion, or simply class-time devoted to working on a bigger project. Whatever kind of in-class writing you use, it conveys that you value the act of writing enough to give some of your precious teaching time to it. That message is amplified if you write alongside your students.

Given our current conundrum with many of us trying to limit our students’ use of AI, we have other reasons to do in-class writing:

• Your students will get something written toward a longer assignment, preempting the procrastination that can lead to cheating.
• Consciousness that you or their classmates might glimpse whatever’s on the screen can deter students from accessing tools your class has agreed not to use.

I spoke with several IU faculty members who have recently started asking students to write in class.

Megan Murphy, Biology

Professor Murphy teaches a biology course that combines intensive writing with undergraduate research. When she asked students for feedback on her teaching methods, some asked her to “flip the class,” a technique where lectures are moved to video recordings that students watch on their own, freeing up class time for interaction and application. Murphy has a series of lessons about science writing where she explains concepts such as composing a results section, creating figures, and distinguishing between passive and active voice (hint from Murphy: if you can add “by zombies,” your sentence is probably passive!). Now she’s moving those explanations to videos recorded in Kaltura and posted on Canvas, allocating class time to students working on their writing assignments. She sees students’ engagement with this approach as they work on their writing, sometimes consulting with their research partners, sometimes coming to her for feedback on their drafts.

Elizabeth Geballe, Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures

Professor Geballe teaches courses on Russian literature in translation, including a course often taken to complete a general education requirement. With the advent of ChatGPT in 2022, she had to re-evaluate her approach to assigning writing, as she found that many of her students’ papers suddenly sounded the same. “Writing forces us to wrestle with our ideas as we struggle to articulate them,” Geballe explains, and she didn’t want students abandoning that thinking process by outsourcing their writing to a bot. With apparent AI misuse continuing despite her clear policy, she cut all the traditional literature papers she’d previously assigned, shifting to in-class writing (mostly by hand) and oral exams. She’s found that these single-draft essays, composed in about 30 minutes, show critical thinking, though they are inevitably less developed than the longer essays she assigned pre-2022. A sample prompt for an in-class essay shows the outside-of-the-box thought she promotes: “Re-write the murder scene from Crime and Punishment as a slapstick comedy, highlighting the potentially humorous elements in Dostoevsky’s text.”

John Robison, Philosophy

Believing that writing is key to developing ideas in depth, Professor Robison assigns essays in all his philosophy classes. He employs best practices around gen AI such as regularly discussing ethical and practical issues with students and setting a generous policy for late work. Yet, many of the essays he was getting sounded robotic. To help him ascertain the extent of misuse, in his assignment instructions, he embedded a secret prompt that would yield a certain sentence in gen AI’s output. Using this technique and others, he found that around one in six papers were heavily relying on gen AI (and these, he notes, “were just the obvious cases”). So, this semester, he transformed his assignments, created a meticulously scaffolded process in which students write essays during class time across several sessions. Because Robison has set up these essays in Canvas Quizzes with Respondus Lockdown Browser, during the writing sessions, students can only access relevant materials like course readings—erasing the temptation to turn to AI. Since the assignment requires students to come back to their essays repeatedly, and asks them to reflect on their process, it encourages revision and metacognition. So far, Robison sees the resulting essays being equally thoughtful to those students would have written as homework in the past, and some students have commented on how their thinking has evolved substantially as they write, pause, return, and continue.

How’d he set all this up? In this hour-long video, Robison explains the process in detail:

Stay tuned to this blog for more details of Robison’s innovative approach.