The Grading Podcast

165 – John Warner

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John Warner: When it comes to students and AI, academic integrity, cheating, et cetera, et cetera, I believe we have to go on offense. And offense is learning. Defense is preventing cheating, right? Um, I fundamentally believe we have to treat student, let’s call it misuse of AI, and, and that’s a very broad statement. But broadly, students turning to AI automation when we want them doing something in the absence of that technology. Um, I think trying to defend against cheating, um, will always have limited results and always compromise learning. So we have to think about learning. We have to treat this as a demand-side problem where students have to be, um, put in a position where they see making that choice to outsource their learning to the AI as the wrong one-

Boz: Welcome to The Grading Podcast, where we’ll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students’ learning, from traditional grading to alternative methods of grading. We’ll look at how grades impact our classrooms and our students’ success. I’m Robert Bosley, a high school math teacher, instructional coach, intervention specialist, and instructional designer in the Los Angeles Unified School District and with Cal State LA.

Sharona: And I’m Sharona Krinsky, a math instructor at Cal State Los Angeles, faculty coach, and instructional designer. Whether you work in higher ed or K-12, whatever your discipline is, whether you are a teacher, a coach, or an administrator, this podcast is for you. Each week, you will get the practical, detailed information you need to be able to actually implement effective grading practices in your class and at your institution

Boz: Hello and welcome back to The Grading Podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of your two co-hosts, and with me, as always, Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: I’m doing well so far. I haven’t drowned in the semester, but I feel like the water level’s getting closer to my nose as I get more into this. But I’m having a lot of fun with the start of my semester and all this new math I’m learning for my mathematics of voting class. So how are you doing, though?

Boz: At the time of this recording I am on day two of a four-day weekend. So I’m doing well. And like you said, we are just finished our second week at Cal State, so class is going surprisingly well so far, so I’m glad to hear yours is too.

Sharona: This is your first time back into sort of the more mathy part for a couple of years, right? ‘Cause you’ve been doing statistics for so long, but is this your first time back into pre-calculus for a while?

Boz: Yeah, actually this is my first time back in pre-calc since last time I taught a pre-calc class was in one of my high school settings, and that was a while ago. So yes, it is different being back in that world instead of the statistics. So I am thrilled to hear, and when we want to learn more, hear more about your journey with this new class. We’ve talked a lot about it over the summer as you were planning for it, so we’ll give you a couple more weeks and then we want a in-depth update of how it’s going. But for today, we are not alone in the virtual studio. So Sharona, who do we have with us?

Sharona: So I am super excited because we actually just learned about this person relatively recently, and I reached out, and then we were able to get this recording really fast. So we have with us today opinion author from Inside Higher Ed, John Warner. He does a lot of other things, but that’s how we found him. So John Warner has 20 years of college teaching experience across four different institutions and is now a writer, editor, and frequent campus and school speaker focused on how to teach writing in a world with artificial intelligence. He’s the author of eight books. The most recent one is More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI. But then I love some of his previ- previous titles, especially the Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities. He also has a newsletter, and I think it’s The Biblioracle. I think that’s how you say it. That’s not how I wanna say it when I read it, but The Biblioracle Recommends. He’s also an advisor to a social writing game. So John, thank you so much for coming on the pod today.

John Warner: Oh, my pleasure to be here.

Boz: And if that name sounds familiar to our audience, there is a reason for that. Over the last several weeks, and probably longer than that, we have done a lot of current event things going on with grading, and several of the articles that we have referred to during these episodes were articles written by John. So we are thrilled to have you on. We definitely wanna get into some of these articles about AI and about everything that’s gone on recently with Harvard and MIT, and Michigan. But before we do that, something we always like to do on this podcast is ask our new guest just how did you get involved in this crazy world of alternative grading?

And this kicked off years of experimenting in terms of how I presented the experiences of teaching writing to students. And ultimately I got about as far as I could with the assignment side, right? With the pedagogy of that. And I realized that my assignments that I were now calling experiences were fundamentally out of sync with the assessment method that I was clinging to, which was I give you a grade at the end of this experience based on how accomplished I think that written artifact is. And, I could not live in this tension anymore. And it was clear that my students were not learning as much as they could. They would even tell me like, “Hey man, you said everything is about practice and process and et cetera, et cetera, and yet at the end, our grade is entirely dependent on what you tell us how good this thing is.” And so I started reading in ungrading and alternative grading and things like Asao Inoue’s labor structure and these sorts of things. Came up with my own methods, trying to first meld traditional grading and alternative grading and a series of experiments semester by semester until I just said, “Screw it. I’m going to put it on students.”

And by the end of my career, I evolved into there were two questions that students had to be able to answer at the end of every assignment, then at the end of the semester, which is what do you know now that you didn’t know before? What can you do now that you couldn’t do before? And provide evidence of those things. And they would write these sort of reflective narratives around these things. And then we would have a conference, and that became the grade. And it was, a- again, I can’t overstate the struggles and the failures to get there. This is in, we were talking about this before we started recording, this is in an essay that’s collected in Susan Blum’s Ungrading anthology, where I write about Wile E. Coyote as the patron saint of ungraders because you have to you make these elaborate plans, and they blow up in your face. I was done with it having it blow up my, in my face, and I committed to it, and by golly, it worked. Students were paying more attention to their work. I would argue the rigor of that they put into the course increased. There was no inconsistency between my assessment of their work and their self-assessment, right? Which was a huge finding for me, that I could trust students to know when they were learning, that was something that was actionable. And so then I didn’t look back.

You ask for an origin story. The origin story goes back twenty years at this point. But it was really asking myself, are my students learning or are they doing school? And I realized that too much of what they were doing was around completing school assignments and I wanted them to learn I I would’ve been over the moon to have resources like this podcast or anthologies like Susan Blum’s Ungrading or Josh Eyler’s book on grading at the time I was going through these struggles. It really is the school of hard knocks in terms of my ungrading there was some stuff out there, right? There was Asao Inoue, there was Jesse Stommel was writing about these things. Linda Nilson’s work on contract grading which I appreciated, but I knew wasn’t quite right for what I wanted to do. It was there, but it was nascent, right? What I see in the world now is that this conversation is becoming increasingly ripe, and frankly, I find it exciting and encouraging.

Sharona: Benjamin Bloom …

Boz: Benjamin’s Bloom, Mastery Learning going back into the ’60s. But yeah, I would’ve killed to have had a book like David Clarke’s and Robert Talbert’s Grading for Growth book back when we started, which

Sharona: So instead we became a case study in that book.

Boz: Yeah, we were one of the case studies in that book. But yeah, the, there is so much more resources out there now. But as you’re talking about this your origin story, it really seems like a lot of us, we come from two different camps. Either we adjusted our assessment And then eventually figured out that our grading doesn’t align with our assessments anymore, or we started with our grading and then figured out our assessments don’t match anymore. So we come to the same place, but it’s just do you, did you start with the assessment or did you start with the grading?

John Warner: This is I don’t like do workshops on alternative grading per se, but when I go and talk, talk or a workshop around writing an AI, right? Like you not talk about assessment, right? Because it’s a huge part of it. And really where I rest is, and I think really what you’re getting at there, is that ultimately both of these things the experience itself, the assignment, and the way we assess it, have to be consistent with each other, and they also have to be consistent with our deep underlying values around like what we’re trying to teach, why we’re trying to teach it to them, right? Like you’re a math guy, I’m a English writing guy. We have to understand why do our subjects matter? Like what are we conveying to them? Like we can have students pass tests till the cows come home and not learn anything.

This is so obvious it’s almost banal to say at this point, but in, in the workshops I’ll say “Everybody in this room earned an A where they learned nothing. Everybody in this room learned something in a class where they got less than an A.” So we have to be able to deeply understand what it is, exactly what it is we’re trying to have students learn through the experiences of learning. And if the assessment is not aligned with that we’re constantly undermining our own goals. And that was me. That was, I am talking out of two sides of my mouth where practice, process, take risks, right? Try to do something you don’t think you can do and then but, oh, by the way, this wasn’t great in these ways according to the criteria of good writing that I’m holding you to. Un-until I could reconcile those things, I was not teaching at my best. And the, even the bigger problem was I was not giving myself a framework that allowed me to progress and advance in my own teaching. I was constantly holding myself back

Boz: Yeah I was the exact same way. My core belief as a math educator is, mistakes allow thinking to happen. And my grading, when I was still doing traditional grading, even when I was doing all the band-aids that I was trying to put in there to make it better, it was a direct conflict with that belief. Because as long as you’re using averages and you are averaging everything from the mistakes that they made, at the beginning of the semester the same as at the end, you’re not valuing those mistakes. You’re not valuing, learning by doing a mistake, figuring out that mistake, and growing from it. ‘Cause the, the average takes that away, and it still punishes you. So yeah I was the exact same way.

John Warner: A- amen. Hallelujah. Yeah. For a long time I bought that idea that’s fair, right? Judging students on their performance on these six or eight or 10 pieces of writing that I assigned over the semester, that’s fair. It’s because it’s the same for everybody. Once I cracked that once I cracked that for myself, like what is fair, right? When we say this is fair what, what do we mean? It opens up the possibilities, and I think, you guys have probably explored this more than I have. There’s no one way.

Boz: No.

Sharona: It’s one of our fundamental sayings.

John Warner: To this, right? It’s like first you have to, again, this was my personal experience. I had to let go of the baggage of the system that I had learned in and then worked in for, at that point as a student and college instructor, like four decades at that point. You just have to take a step back and say “What are we doing here? Why are we doing this?” And I think the other part is like you do have to you guys, again, are probably wiser on this front than I am, but one of the big things I had to abandon was the notion that it’s my job fundamentally, primarily to rank and sort students against each other.

Sharona: Yep. You’re hitting all the high notes.

John Warner: That was very, that, that was very hard for me to let go of because I’m the authority, right? Nobody knows more about what good writing is in the room than me. And so once I let that go all kinds of possibilities opened up. But there’s a lot of things that prevent us from, at least prevented me from getting there.

Sharona: So I don’t know, Boz, if you have another question, but I wanna take this in a specific direction. So do you have something else you wanted to say first?

Boz: No, I was just going to comment on you said that, we had to let go of the system that at that point as a student and teacher you’d been involved in for, four decades. It’s not that just that we were involved in it. We were successful at it. If you’re in academia at any level as an educator, you had to have succeeded at some level at the game of education. So it’s not just that we were involved in it, we succeeded in it. So it’s really hard to, let that go and to realize that because we succeeded in it doesn’t mean it’s actually what’s good for students and for learning, because most don’t succeed in it. Especially in the K-12 world. Like it’s-

Sharona: Especially in math.

Boz: Yeah, especially in K-12

John Warner: This is actually really interesting, and I know we wanna go elsewhere, but I think this is important. I, I bo- I agree with that, but my experience was different. I did not succeed in the system particularly well. I succeeded well enough, right? But I was considered a bad student in high school of the sort of doesn’t meet his potential variety, like this, like I was in honors classes-

Sharona: Okay, I’m just gonna leave the chat now because you two can talk.

John Warner: But but I was, like, I was in honors classes, but I’m getting like C’s and B’s and sometimes in math I was getting D’s and that kind of stuff. But to your point once I was in charge in the system, I was like, that me who’s getting bad grades was defective. I … Like the ones who, the people who are getting good grades, that’s … I wish I was that people. In hindsight, I’m like, “You should’ve listened to your 16-year-old self versus your adult self.” But it’s interesting how fraught these things are, right? How complicated they are because of experience and our attitudes and emotions around these things.

Sharona: So where I wanna go is almost a second origin story, which is you are not now anymore in the classroom. And you said some stuff before we started recording about why, but how did you get from point A, which is you’re teaching in the classroom, to point B, you’re writing professionally and getting paid better than you were when you were teaching, right? Something like that. It.

John Warner: Yeah, no, it was really really a a function of necessity. I’ll tell it as quickly as I can. If people want the gory details, they can go to my Inside Higher Ed column and look for a piece called This Is Not a Quit Lit Essay. But I had e- I had essentially spent my entire teaching career as a non-tenure track instructor of various kinds at four different institutions because I was and am married and we were following my wife’s career. She’s a veterinarian, and she had done an internship and then a residency which took us to the University of Illinois and then Virginia Tech. I taught at both those places. We went to live in Greenville, South Carolina, and I was working at Clemson, and I just love teaching. It always seemed temporary. While Kathy’s getting a residency, I’m gonna teach. Or, “Okay, we’ve moved to Greenville, I’m gonna get a job at Clemson,” and this kind of stuff. I also was writing, like I used to say my writing supports my teaching habit which allows me to do it. But ultimately it came to a point where I, we were living in Charleston, we had moved to Charleston, I was working at College of Charleston, and a tenure track job in creative writing opened, and my degree is, I have an MFA in creative writing. I’ve published a novel, a book of short stories. I’ve taught crea- like I, I’m credentialed. I’m appropriately credentialed for this job, as were probably 100 other people who applied for it, right? And I didn’t get it, and I had a visiting instructorship, which I was year to year, but I was assured, “You can have this as long as you want,” but who know, who, who knows if that’s true.

And not to confess my dirty laundry, but I was making $35,000 a year as I approached 50 years of age and I just realized, like you, you can’t have a secure future if the thing you spend the majority of your time spent on this thing where you make $35,000 a year. Now, I was fortunate that I was making extra income through writing and editing and that kind of stuff. But it was a grind, right? Like I’m I’m reaching sort of the end, and so I just decided I’m gonna quit. And once I made that decision, I’m like: what else can you do? And I realized I’d been writing for Inside Higher Ed for years. I’d been writing about pedagogy a lot and my struggles with things like ungrading. And I’d published other books. I’m like, “All right maybe you have a book.” And so I wrote a proposal for what became Why They Can’t Write, sold that. While I was writing Why They Can’t Write, I had an idea for, I’m like, you talk you, you talk about how we need to change how we teach writing and why they can’t write, and you think you how that should be. Why don’t you do a book of curriculum?” So that became another book called The Writer’s Practice.

Those books got into the world, which was great and I, did some of the work I do now. But I was mostly– I went back to work in market research. I was a market research consultant after college or after graduate school. Left it to follow my wife’s career. But then an amazing thing happened. ChatGPT appeared in the world. And I I wouldn’t say I was uniquely prepared for something like this, the arrival of something like this, but I was prepared because I had spent years saying, “We have to stop students doing,” what I call in Why They Can’t Write, “writing-related simulations, following prescriptive processes that are then graded against a rubric where they don’t actually learn how to write.” Like we ne-we need to stop. We also need to create the conditions that allow people to teach in ways that are different from that. That’s the other necessities of Why They Can’t Write. The stuff that I had to live through throughout my career, and that do-doesn’t need to be the case should not be the case for most people who teach writing. And all of a sudden, people wanted to talk to somebody who had thought a lot about how we teach writing, because now we have this machine that can produce writing. And that led to More Than Words, my more– most recent book.

But it really is just people have recognized that there is this problem around our transactional system of school where students do things for a grade. We now have this homework machine this thing that for all practical purposes can do for students what we ask them to do according to these sort of traditional assignments and assessments, and what do we do about it? So I go and try to help people think through this problem, right? Unfortunately because there is no specific method, like I can’t just say, do this,” everybody has to think through their issue. It’s complicated. But people do need the help thinking. They like hearing from a sympathetic ear and being able to come back to me after I do a presentation and run stuff by me, so that’s what I, that’s what I do now. I still miss teaching. I wish I, I wish, honestly wish I could afford to get back in the classroom, but for, 3,200 bucks a course, it’s just not in the cards right now. But someday. Someday I’ll get back.

John Warner: The challenge is to make learning manifest, right? To students first, right? I think my focus is on students knowing that they’re learning something, but also the, the world wants to know that learning is happening, and that’s a challenge.

Boz: So I’m looking at your list of recently published articles in Inside Higher Ed, and your last eight starting with the one that just came out yesterday to the one that came out on June 10th I knew we’d been talking a lot about your articles. I did not realize out of your last eight, we have talked extensively about four of them, and two of them, the one that just came out yesterday and the one that came out on August 28th, “Moral Instruction Will Not Stop Cheating,” are two that if we’ll probably talk some on this and on episodes to come. So like I said, I knew we had been talking about some of your articals- I did not realize how many of these that… a- and it has, it’s been, like I said, a- about the AI because all three of us agree that AI is fundamentally changing education, especially higher ed, but even further than that. And about all this grading stuff that’s been going on in the news with Harvard and MIT and Michigan. Your writing has been incredible, and like I said, we’ve talked a lot about it.

But I also fundamentally believe that we cannot retreat wholly to in-class assessments. I know it’s true for writing, because a huge part of writing is brainstorming it’s drafting, it’s revising, it’s editing, it’s rewriting. Really what you’re looking at in those, in, in those recent columns is a series of rethinkings, column to column. This new information has come in, and so now I need to write about it in this way, even though they’re to some degree repetitive. So if w- if we confine everything to the classroom, my belief is we’re not preparing students for the work they’re gonna confront, which is like you have to go think and act knowing this technology is there, and knowing when you should think and act, and when you could maybe get away with using the technology. I don’t know, where do you … Do you guy- where do you guys sit on this stuff?

Sharona: I … Lots of opinions. Can I go first, Boz?

Boz: Yeah, go ahead.

Sharona: So I’m a user of AI. Couple things to set the groundwork. First of all, I’m an excellent writer. I … And what I mean by that is I have been well-trained to spit out well-written grants, written reports, letters of reference. For a mathematician, I’m an excellent writer. And that’s partially ’cause my mom was a mathematician who had an English minor. So I feel confident in my writing. And I have a million things in my head that constitute good pedagogy. I’ve been trained on career relevance, I’ve been trained on cultural awareness, I’ve been trained on active learning, I’ve been trained on all this stuff. It is extremely difficult and time-consuming for me to put all of this stuff together and to write it in a way that’s gonna be good for students. AI is way better at that than I am, and quite frankly, I’m more concerned with making sure that my content knowledge and my awareness and my ability to assess a piece of written content to meet the purpose I want, it’s better for me than spending the time to write it. I literally could not do my job if I had to write everything myself, which is why before AI, I just didn’t do it all. I, I had to pick and choose. Now I have this tool that because I’m an expert in certain things, I can make myself so much more productive, and my students’ experience is so much better.

But I know the goal that I’m trying to hit, and I know how to guide the AI to get there. And so for me, looking into the future, I need my students to become the critical thinkers to be able to do what I do. ‘Cause I don’t know how I would know how to do this if I had grown up with this tool. So that’s where I’m going.

John Warner: The key, you said, because I’m an expert. You have– This is where this, this framework I use of the practice, the skills, knowledge, attitudes, habits in mind. If you have a well-established practice, like you do what you do, and you know what you do, like you have this sort of metacognitive awareness of it “This is my work,” you can then evolve your practice, and it is more than possible to evolve your practice in ways that incorporate the assistance of automated text generation, which is how I describe AI outputs to dis- ’cause I distinguish it from writing. Writing is human. Automated text generation is an output of a large language model. Human writers can make use of automated text generation. There’s no doubt about it, right? But if we don’t have that because I’m an expert, the capacities f- of the knowl- skills, knowledge, attitudes, and habits in mind we are not using it to, to that higher purpose. And I just think it’s almost axiomatic that students are not expert, right? That students are learning.

And my attitudes aren’t like it’s not like some sort of like old school like boot camp or something. Like you gotta go through the hard stuff until you can do it. It’s more like, no, you actually won’t be able to do the thing at all if you don’t have the skills, knowledge, attitudes, and habits in mind that allow you to do it. And that, that is, particularly in writing, that’s what we’re trying to, I think, uncover is what are the key things that have to be in place in order to not be compromised by this technology? Or, I think the risk for people who have these practices is over time you could de-skill yourself, right? Like you really do lose the capacities ’cause you’re doing– The, the way that like GPS has made it so I can’t use a map and a compass anymore. Or the other risk that I’ve, I’m, I’ve been more and more alert to lately is what I call self-alienation. That is where the goal of productivity above all overrides the interests of engagement, and we use– we begin to overuse the technology because we think we can do more, and more, and more, and more. Not, this is not a, not saying that this is what you’re, what is happening to you. What it really is, we have to decide what is worth making first and have that level of discernment, and then say, “Okay, I can allow this technology in this case for this,” rather than like, “Oh, I can do everything.”

There’s some people who I think have lost their minds with these AI agents, who are like, “Oh, there’s every idea I’ve ever had can now be realized because my agents can go do it.” And on the one hand, that sounds kinda cool. On the other hand I just wanna be like, “Why do you wanna do that?” What is the benefit of everything? We really only have a capacity for so much, and I think that’s part of what the current struggle is to where is the enhancement and where is the potential for de-skilling, alienation, that sort of thing.

Boz: No, I, so I wanted to kinda go back to what you were talking about with, how do we deal with AI now. Because I am not, I’m the oddball out of, when it comes to writing. I am by far, out of the three of us, I will guarantee, factors below either one of you. I am not a good writer at all. I-

Sharona: That’s a lie.

Boz: No, it’s not.

Sharona: He’s mostly true. It just takes him a lot longer to write something good.

Boz: But, when you were talking about bringing, seeing so many other people bringing all the writing back into the class, bringing it into blue books, like that my, my heart rate literally went up. My, my blood pressure went up. As a student, I would absolutely fail in that, that kind of scenario. I do not write well. I do not, really do not write well on timed, on-the-spot writing. I joke with my students, but this is, I, this is not me exaggerating When I took the GRE, when I took CBEST, which is a California K12 educators exam when I’ve taken some of the Oklahoma tests, if there’s a writing component, every one of those tests I have scored so high on all the other parts that I would’ve passed the test, and the writing was so low that I automatically failed. Like my GRE, when I was getting– When I got my master’s at University of Texas Arlington for curriculum instructional design of mathematics, they literally called me and said that they were going to admit me on on a probation status because I scored so off the charts on the GRE on everything but writing, but my writing was several points below what they normally would admit.

John Warner: This is amazing. This is hilarious because it really points out the limits of that kind of writing assessment, right? What is privileged in that atmosphere. And I was the opposite. I when I was in college I was, I would… Again, because I was not a good student, I was always looking for the angle. So I would sign up for 21 hours of courses with the intention of dropping at least six hours, and sometimes up to nine hours of class. And because it was back in the day before the internet, I had to go and get the syllabus and stuff. The second I saw, “Oh, this class is entirely in-class essays, and then the final is three hours where you write a bunch of essays,” I was like, “Sign me up,” because I can be glib and persuasive while knowing next to nothing. And the surface level presentation is the kind of thing where like, particularly in a, like a big class like where TAs are grading like 60 of these each, they were like, “This kid seems smart. I’m gonna give him his B plus and we’re gonna move on with our day.” I’m like, that was my sweet spot, right? But I, this is how I knew, this is how I knew and how I know those sorts of assessments have their limits because I would get B’s or even A’s on some of these exams where I knew I had read maybe 15% of the material. I had just strung together enough an illusion that I had done something that it would pass.

And so we really have to think what are we valuing when we do these assessments, right? The value of I’m going to give everything’s going to be an in-class essay. It’s like, okay, you’re going to let the glib easy, proficient surface level writers do well in your class, but the people who benefit from slow thinking which I think is a great asset when it comes to the quality of writing ultimately will be punished by it. That’s just a fact.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So I want to follow on that though. However yes and one of the things I like about doing the alternative grading where you’re not looking for the glib perfect artifact combined with in-class assessment is that a good instructor could have possibly helped you, Boz, by seeing where you really are and getting you to go further, and the grade is on that growth and not on the glib perfection of the thing.

John Warner: That’s an excellent point, and it really it d- it is what you value, right? I don’t

Sharona: know. Bosley looks like you disagree with me.

John Warner: Here’s the here’s, I never did this on an in-class piece of writing, but there were times where I used one point, literal one point rubrics for student writing, and the one point was signs of life. That was it. And I would often use that in like workshop contexts where students are reading each other’s stuff, like a creative writing workshop or something. And ’cause over, over time I got I just got tired of, particularly in creative writing, we would have these long discussions about quote unquote, “Craft, point of view, and setting and character.” And ultimately I was just bored with it. And I realized when I read a good short story, I’m not consciously evaluating setting, point of view, and craft. I am just reacting. And the reality is that I’m having an experience. And so instead we can privilege the experience where it is just looking for signs of life. That’s what we’re, we want in our writing, signs of life. And if we can privilege those things in-class writing, we can then maybe move students to effective out-of-class writing.

Boz: All right. So I I wanna use this topic to transition into one of your recent writings ’cause it’s not one that we’ve talked about and it’s definitely one that I know we want to. It came out on August 28th Moral Instruction Will Not Stop Cheating. So if the answer isn’t bring everything back into the classroom, paper, pencil, lockdown which as a math instructor we’ve also seen, ’cause Sharona and I were in a class together that she coordinated that all of our assessments were actually asynchronous and online, which I loved ’cause it gave me so much instructional time back with my students that I wasn’t having to spend on all these checkpoint proficiency quizzes that we were doing But with AI doing that, there was a lot of questions. So if the answer isn’t forcing, trying to do this, I’m gonna lock everything down and just prevent it, then what is it? And in this article, I love the subheader, “The way to stop cheating is to worry less about cheating and more about learning.”

John Warner: When it comes to students and AI, academic integrity, cheating, et cetera, et cetera, I believe we have to go on offense. And offense is learning. Defense is preventing cheating, right? I fundamentally believe we have to treat student, let’s call it misuse of AI and that’s a very broad statement, but broadly, students turning to AI automation when we want them doing something in the absence of that technology. I think trying to defend against cheating will always have limited results and always compromise learning.

So we have to think about learning. We have to treat this as a demand-side problem, where students have to be put in a position where they see making that choice to outsource their learning to the AI as the wrong one, not because it’s cheating necessarily but mostly because they will be, pardon this sort of usage, but cheating themselves, right? Where they will be missing out on an experience that they actually want to do. And I think this can be done. I know it can be done. This is what I talk about when I go and do a workshop how to do these things, but it does take some, some planning, doing, and structure. We have to first, I think, make students realize that our course is fundamentally about their learning.

You guys wouldn’t be surprised, but some people would be surprised how often students don’t think about this when they get into a college course, right? That they see the goal is to get a grade. What, what is learning in that context? I, I think we have to project a kind of transparent and genuine enthusiasm for what we are hoping students learn, that this is meaningful. In my first-year writing courses, I used to say in my course policies, this was long before ChatGPT was in the world, was that first-year writing was a fundamental key to living a life of happiness and ultimate fulfillment. I said that in the course policies, and students would laugh at me, and I would say, “But I believe it because what I’m trying to help you do is be thinking, acting human beings who can interact with the world and come up with their own ideas about how they wanna live their lives and then express those to others.”

So We have to think about the learning first and show students how if you engage in these things I’m asking you to do, the learning will come, and then you will benefit from this learning. Sure, you’ll benefit from this learning because maybe it’ll help you get a job or it’ll be useful in your future or whatever, but primarily it’s interesting in the moment, right? We’re recording this on Saturday. Tomorrow, on Sunday I go and play classic rock with a couple of other middle-aged geezers. And then, once a month we go to a Kickin’ Chicken or a the Trolley Pub and we stand on stage and play these things in front of other other people. We are not great, but we’re good enough, and the idea that I I would outsource that rehearsal because my AI drummer is going to superior to, be superior to me is bonkers. I’m there to have this experience of playing music with these other middle-aged geezers a- and have that experience. What I think students struggle with is often school deprivileges experience for the outcome the transaction, the grade. And so that’s where I’m coming from on this stuff.

Sharona: And I struggle with– I’ve been struggling with that as a parent for several years. I have two recent college graduates, two boys. The younger one developed a lifelong learning sort of personality, let’s call it, and the older one was like, “I love to learn, but not in school.” He had a goal. He hit his goal. He wanted to be in the Army. He’s in the Army. So getting his degree was just something to get through. There was nothing you were gonna be able to do to convince him that learning his non-Army stuff was valuable. And he was probably right for the majority of the required classwork, and that is what is worrying me for the institution of higher education right now, is we have these structures and these major pathways and these lists of classes that I think most students are looking at and quite rightly saying, “Eh, this is not really worth.

John Warner: It’s illegible to them. They don’t they can’t really understand why this is the path that’s been put in front of them.

Sharona: I’m not convinced that we’re right with the path that we’re putting in front of them is the problem. I’m a big heretic here, and I’m going back to what you said about skills, knowledge, attitude, and habits of mind. You were talking about writing, but I think there’s something bigger, and this is the one I really worry about. Skills, knowledge, attitude, and habits of mind for becoming an expert learner. Because I am actually using ChatGPT not only to do the stuff I already know how to do better, but there’s some stuff that I’m having to learn right now ’cause I’m teaching a class new to me, and I’m inquiring of it when I don’t understand something from the textbook I’m reading or from the this or the that. I will dive in, but I’m an expert learner. So how do we create expert… Isn’t that at the core, the goal of the universities, at least the higher ed should be to create an expert learner

John Warner: You would hope. Yeah. You’ll have to have me back on, and we can have a long discussion about general education and that kind of stuff, because I’ve got a million thoughts on that, and I think that maybe are similar to yours. I wrote a piece probably a decade ago where I argued that half of the general education credits, right? The stuff that students treat as, “Oh, I gotta do this and get it out of the way before I get to the real stuff.” I argue that half of the general education credits should be reserved for after junior year, or for junior and senior year. And that we should use those general education courses as tests of to how much students are learning about how to learn, right? I think often the, the reason students treat those courses as afterthoughts is because they’re actually not ready for the kind of inquiry we’re asking of them. So your point is important and well taken.

And me knowing that stuff, right? Like at this point, it’s a little bit second nature, right? I’m 56 years old. I’ve had this professional life as a writer and teacher for so long. And so we can’t expect students to achieve that by the time they’re graduating seniors. But at the very least, I think what we can do is to make those goals and that orientation visible legible, and maybe most importantly, I think to your point, desirable. That is, that I should continue to be this sort of person in the world, if that makes sense beyond, beyond school. If anything right now, I think school cuts against those goals, right? Because it is hugely transactional. But we should be rethinking all of these things as we consider the impact of this technology.

John Warner: And that would be a rational choice for you at that stage, right? Because this is what the system is asking, to produce these things and therefore be judged on them. And so when students one of the things I do when I go do a campus visit, as much as possible, is I ask for an audience with students where there’s nobody from the institution in the room. It’s me, students, and some sub sandwiches or Chinese food or something like that, and I just ask them “Do you use this technology? Why do you use it? How do you feel about it?” And it’s exactly what you just articulated. It’s like sometimes I don’t want to, but I feel like I have to because maybe I’m at a disadvantage if I don’t,” or I had a shift at my job that night and the assignment needed to be done.” And if we don’t confront this reality of the structures of the system, we will continually incentivize students to avoid learning because we’re actually asking them to do something else, not learning.

Boz: But, my point to what I was saying was, I’m wondering if, like you said, half of my gen ed classes i- in college had to have been reserved for after I had done some of my more major work. I’m wondering if I still would have had that kind of mentality with my history class after taking my history of math class and learning a bit of a love for the history of mathematics, if that would have translated into more of a love for history in general. And also same with the writing. After taking one of my math theory classes and learning the importance of writing to a mathematician- if those classes if I still would’ve been so quick to have gone. I, a- and I, that’s a really interesting concept, that idea, and I would like to explore that more, but

John Warner: Yeah. No, it’s you were you were switched on, right? The stuff in your primary field of interest was like, “Oh, here I am. I’m in the on position.” And then once you’re on, it’s like more things become interesting to you, right? I was the opposite. I avoided math. I didn’t even… I took zero math courses in college which I, which maybe isn’t even possible anymore.

Sharona: It’s pretty close.

John Warner: But I don’t know, maybe you guys can, you’ll either condemn me or sympathize with me, but I got progressively dumber in math each year of high school. I started high school on track to take AP Calculus my junior year of high school. By senior year, I was in a pre-calculus course with all freshmen. So I was a senior, everyone else in the course was a freshman, and they were taking pre-calculus. They were gonna take AP Calculus as sophomores, so they were, like, the super, super advanced kids. I, I hit a wall in math basically after geometry, because geometry made sense to me ’cause they were just logic puzzles. But one- as soon as I hit trigonometry and Algebra 2, I could not understand what any of this was for. I did not know why I would have to learn sine, cosine, tangent, any of that stuff. And so when my math teacher would put, “This is how you use this formula to get this output,” I’d be like, I don’t get it. It makes no sense to me.” It all became a, a form of gibberish, right? And I’m wondering, the inverse of this stuff, like if somebody had given me a history of math course before they made me take trigonometry, would I have done better in trigonometry?

Sharona: Probably. I got to teach history of math once. It was a lot of fun. We are coming up on time, but I wanted to just say one thing that I think a lot of our listeners at this point might be screaming at us for not having said. So way back at the beginning, you said that you got sick of ranking and sorting your students, and one of the things that we say here all the time, and this is maybe where we hopefully can leave it, is one of the things we’ve got to change is the purpose of grades. And if the purpose of grades is to communicate learning, I think that this takes us down this path that we’ve all been talking about that we wanna go. So-

John Warner: 100, yeah, 100%. I understand the institutional imperative around grades, grade point average, class rank, this kind of stuff, but what I realized eventually is that has nothing to do with me. That is not my job. My job is to help students learn how to write or a literature course to have an experience, encounter with literature that will be make an impression and perhaps last and resonate beyond their sophomore gen ed lit course. I fundamentally do not care about grade point averages. I fundamentally do not care about class ranks. I don’t care about who’s summa cum laude. This is not my concern. My concern is learning, and so my assessment must be consistent with my concern, which is learning. And if that is at odds with the ranking and sorting of students, so be it. I, that’s not my business. My business is learning.

You probably know more of these folks than I do, but I… There’s a lot of folks when I’ve written about this say “But that’s, but the, the college is there to ” essentially they have a view that the great sorting system of higher education is really to sort the wheat from the chaff, right? Our job is to push some students up and and separate others as though they are not worthy. This just does not make sense to me as an educator. That’s not my job. And so part– That, that gets back to why I’m not that concerned about, like, why I don’t focus on cheating why I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about academic integrity from the sense of academic integrity. Learning is academic integrity in and of itself, and you might have listeners who are wrestling with these things, and I, I, what I would say to them is I wrestled with these also. Like, where I sit now saying these things confidently, this is not where I was when I started this 20 years ago. It really is figuring out what is your relationship to your students, to your subject, to what you want them to learn, and then you must have a scheme of assessment that is consistent with those things. And I think when a lot of people examine traditional forms of assessment, particularly built around ranking and sorting, they’ll find their goals of learning inconsistent with those structures of assessment.

Boz: A- absolutely. I can’t think of a better way to kind of end this on. John, I wanna thank you so much for coming on and for all the writing that you have been putting out. I’m sure Sharona and I are gonna keep using it as some of our source material.

Sharona: And we’ll have you back. Absolutely.

Boz: Yes. Oh, it’d be absolutely.

John Warner: My pleasure.

Boz: Lots of things that we didn’t even start to touch on but thank you so very much for coming on, and to our listeners, this has been The Grading Podcast with Boz and Sharona, and we’ll see you next week.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode’s page on our website, http://www.thegradingpod.com. Or you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. If you would like to suggest a future topic for the show or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show, please use the Contact Us form on our website. The Grading Podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.

Boz: The views expressed here are those of the host and our guest. These views are not necessarily endorsed by the Cal State System or by the Los Angeles Unified School District.