Julie Gonzalez

Last winter quarter, Julie Gonzalez, senior continuing lecturer in the Economics Department, was facing a problem that every instructor in every higher education institution in the world also faced: large language models that can take a quiz, respond to a discussion prompt, or write a paper in seconds. But it wasn’t just Julie who was troubled by the rampant and widespread misuse of generative artificial intelligence. It was also her students. That quarter, she taught Economic Rhetoric (ECON 197), a required upper-division writing course for economics majors. Some of her students told her that they were tired of seeing their classmates submit work that had been produced by AI. 

After the quarter had ended, Julie ordered a few pizzas and invited her students to share their thoughts. Among them: a worry that pervasive AI-enabled misconduct will devalue their degrees; feelings of resentment toward classmates who don’t do their own work; and a sense that there’s a tipping point for academic misconduct, after which it becomes the norm. “If some percentage of students cheat,” Julie said, “then everyone has to cheat.”

Many educators and institutions have turned to new technologies to address this new variety of technology-enabled misconduct: AI-detectors, lockdown browsers, version history analysis. Julie’s solution was more along the lines of what Clay Shirky, NYU’s vice provost for AI and technology in education, has called “medieval options”: writing by hand in class in physical notebooks. Each quarter, Julie buys a spiral-bound notebook for each of her ECON 197 students. At the beginning of every class session, she hands the notebooks out. Students use them for all notes and for all in-class work. “They put all of their thoughts in the notebooks,” she said. At the end of class, Julie collects the notebooks and stores them securely in the trunk of her car. 

On the first day of class, students first engage in discussion and debate about a handful of economic issues, and then they write a short ungraded essay summarizing their thoughts. That first piece of writing serves as a reference sample for the rest of the quarter. The first major assignment is an outline that they write in their notebooks in class. Next, a draft (again, in their notebooks in class), which they type into Canvas in the following class session. Students revise and submit their essays outside of class, but because they do the prerequisite work in their notebooks, there’s no doubt that their work is their own. The notebooks are “a paper trail for their ideas.”

Julie has found this approach to be supportive not only of academic integrity but also of the learning outcomes for her course. Because students do most of their writing in class, they don’t procrastinate, and they don’t skip steps in the writing process. If they don’t do well on a particular assignment, they have the option of revising for a better grade. Part of each class session is devoted to group work: Students read their work aloud and give each other feedback. Julie also leads whole-class activities, like verbally composing three-part essays on a variety of topics. And of course, Julie gives her students actionable feedback throughout the quarter. To set the tone: “I aggressively edit their first paper.” 

The results are clear: Student writing is better in terms of organization, quality of ideas, and strength of arguments. And while there are a few students each quarter who resist the in-class work, most students tell Julie that they appreciate her approach. “They actually like it. They’re happy to take the notebooks with them at the end of the quarter. It’s a record of what they learned.”