Can Professors Ensure Students Do the Reading? — Minding The Campus

I have always been contemptuous of professors who complain that their students aren’t doing the readings. It is easy to ensure that your students do the reading. Just cold-call them and ask basic questions about the content. My students read the first book of Plato’s Republic last week. Here are some of the questions I asked:

• Provide us with an overview of the dialogue, the setting, the participants, and so on.
• What was the central question? Only ask this if the first student did not mention that it was an inquiry into the nature of Justice.
• What was Cephalus’s definition of Justice?
• What was Socrates’s counter-example to this definition?

I ask these questions of specific students, mostly randomly, but always with an eye toward spreading the questions around, both in this specific class and throughout the course. A student can’t avoid the question by not raising her hand. I don’t do this in a “mean” way. It is never a problem if a student does not remember something from the reading. I just asked a different student the same question. The point is to create an environment in which students are expected to do the reading and to check that they have done so.

This process has worked well for many years. Students hate not to know the answer when called on, especially in front of their peers. Just a few of these check-that-you-did-the-reading questions are enough. The rest of the class can be devoted to more substantive discussion.

But the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) means that this trick will soon stop working, to the extent that it already hasn’t. Just ask ChatGPT, Claude, or your favorite tool to provide you with a 500-word summary of Book I of the Republic. Here is the start of what I get with ChatGPT:

Book I of Plato’s Republic introduces the central themes and questions that will be explored throughout the dialogue. It begins with Socrates visiting the home of the wealthy and elderly Cephalus, where a conversation unfolds about the nature of justice. The discussion is initially lighthearted but becomes increasingly philosophical as Socrates challenges the ideas presented by Cephalus and his companions.

Cephalus, who represents traditional views, first suggests that justice is telling the truth and repaying debts. Socrates quickly refutes this definition by presenting a counterexample: if one borrows a weapon from a friend who later becomes insane, returning the weapon would not be just, even though it fulfills the obligation of returning what is owed.

In writing this essay, I swear that I did not check ahead of time that this 500 word summary would answer the very questions that I use with students. But answer them it does!

Read the whole thing. It is excellent. No student, and almost no professor, could do better. I couldn’t. Could you? Of course, AI sometimes “hallucinates” and just makes things up. One needs to be careful. Yet such concerns are very minor today and will soon disappear almost completely.

This means that my students — and your students — need never do the reading again.

Instead of plowing through 11,000 words of Plato’s occasionally self-indulgent prose, they can simply read 500 words of an excellent summary, which will cover almost all the parts likely to come up in class discussion or on an exam.

The same concern applies more broadly than to humanities classics. When I ask my students to read a recently published article that did not appear in the corpus used to train the AI, they can simply pass in that PDF to the AI and ask for a summary. ChatGPT can understand things it has never seen before and provide students with the highlights.

One idea for ensuring that students have done the reading comes from New College of Florida Professor Andrew Humphries. Consider these instructions from his syllabus:

You are expected to read all readings before attending class. You must also bring physical copies of each of the readings each class they will be discussed. And your readings must be personally annotated. Since familiarity with the texts is a prerequisite for productive conversation about them, students who fail to bring their physical texts to class or whose texts do not show personal annotations will be asked to leave class and will be marked absent for that day.

That is hard core!

I will continue to ask my questions. Even if I can’t guarantee that my students have done the reading, I can at least ensure that they have read a high-quality summary.

Image created by ChatGPT — “Create an image of a robot reading on behalf of a college student.”