AI was ruining my college philosophy classes. So I assigned a new kind of essay.
I couldn’t give take-home assignments anymore. Handwritten tests in class wouldn’t work either. Somehow, I needed to fill ChatGPT’s shoes.
By Tom Kaspers
I haven’t been teaching long enough to remember those fabled days of higher education’s past, when students were engaged, literate, and sociable — before their social media feeds started frying their brains and AI began to write and think in their stead. The first class I taught as a professional philosopher at the University of Chicago was in 2024, when OpenAI had already granted students the power to generate a college-level essay in seconds, creating a real-life version of the Ring of Gyges, Plato’s mythical ring that allows the wearer to sin without consequence. Bad news for philosophers like me, whose discipline is existentially reliant on the essay format.
How do we make students accountable again? In the age of undetectable cheating, professors should aim to supplant the role of ChatGPT, inviting students to come to us to help develop ideas, share their research load, and shape their writing into proper philosophical prose — essentially interrupting the mechanism that pushes students to utilize chatbots in the first place. I argue that this is best achieved by assigning class-wide essays that invite collaboration.
This allows instructors to surrender in the useless game of detecting AI and instead lets us act as cowriters engaged in learning alongside our students. The strategy works particularly well in my philosophy course because the classes are relatively small — only about 20 students.
When I started teaching two years ago, I didn’t yet think that AI was destroying my essay assignments. Students who did well in my class were clearly putting in the effort. They reliably came to office hours to discuss their ideas; they shared links to their drafts, in which I could see them write and edit in real time; and they cared deeply about their projects. The students who didn’t do well also didn’t seem to be frequent users of AI, as both their philosophical ideas and their writing felt very callow.
Only recently did I notice a shift. Those who were most vocal in class, most present during my office hours, and most visibly engaged with their work were no longer reliably writing the best essays. Other students could now just log onto ChatGPT and prompt it, sometimes with better results. This left me with a quandary: There is no better way to measure a student’s philosophical learning than through an essay, but this vital assignment was no longer a reliable measure of a student’s understanding.
Philosophy is about reaching clarity of thought, which is achieved by putting complicated ideas into simple terms. It’s when we write that we’re doing the real work of philosophy, turning a loose collection of thoughts into coherent and defensible theories. Therefore, it’s simply not an option to do away with the essay as an assignment in a philosophy course. Moreover, it would be greatly impoverished if the assignment was AI-proofed by becoming a handwritten timed essay. This wouldn’t allow the student the time to do research based on their own ideas, nor would it allow them to draft and redraft — to chisel away at their ideas until these reach their clearest form.
In an attempt to reimagine the essay assignment, I asked my students if they would want to write an essay together, with me.
My thought was that I would take the place of AI. We’d be in a continuous conversation, bouncing ideas off one another, seeing our theory grow sentence by sentence. Students would have to properly engage in every class to understand where the essay was going. And they’d constantly have to defend their own writing, not just to me but to their fellow students. They might still use AI, but I hoped it would be sufficiently inconvenient to do so. At the very least, they’d have to participate in class, communicate and defend their contributions, and collaborate with me and their fellow students to revise their writing.
When I first asked my students if they would be open to this idea, they fired off a million questions:
“So does everyone write their own section? Or do we all write simultaneously in some shared Google Doc?” “Should we work in subgroups?” “Do we all get the same grade or will you track our individual contributions?”
When I said that it was up to them, they got extremely excited. They felt that whatever we ended up doing, it was going to be new (an experiment), and it was going to be their choice (their experiment).
They opted to write the collective essay and be graded on their own contributions. I assured them I wouldn’t grade on a curve, so that their collaborators wouldn’t also be their competitors. In the same vein, they didn’t want me to factor class participation into the grading, as they worried that it would corrupt the sincerity and informality of our discussions. And, crucially, they feared that a democratic system would introduce too much chaos. Instead, they wanted me to be their Philosopher King, with unlimited veto powers and the ability to rearrange, alter, or cut passages without needing to provide a rationale.
The students proposed essay topics, and then they argued not just about which topic to pick but also about how to pick it. We voted, and then flipped a coin. Had it been tails, we would have written our essay on the philosophy of religion, but George Washington showed his face and commanded us to write on the one problem that’s on everyone’s mind nowadays — the problem that, fittingly, prompted me to begin this experiment in the first place: artificial intelligence.
Our essay ended up being 10,000 words, a respectable length for a serious philosophical essay. The students wrote much more than this, but not everything made the final cut. I tracked their contributions on our shared Google Doc, where every single student wrote, revised, expanded, cut, and streamlined, all in unison. In addition, they emailed me with suggestions for the direction of the essay, summaries of background readings, proposed counterarguments, etc. Every student ended up making their mark on the essay in one way or another.
By the end of our experiment, they shared anonymous feedback on the experience. I’d never been so worried about student feedback, and I was elated when I saw that nearly all comments were very positive. One student wrote, “I really think it’s refreshing to experience something new like this in the classroom. Although sometimes it got stressful, I learned so much not only about the topics at hand, but also about collaboration to its fullest extent.” Another said, “It was kind of what I thought university would be like, being able to go and explore and learn about what you want to learn … and then discussing with others[.] I think it leads to a great accumulation of knowledge as a class.”
Most students said that they had worked a lot harder than they had in the previous academic quarter. They said they had learned more and that they preferred the collective essay to individual essays. More than two-thirds of them said that they would choose to do it again.
They told me that before, when they wrote their individual essays, they knew that it wasn’t real: they were pretending to be philosophers for a grade. But this time they felt they were doing actual, important philosophy. They wanted to submit the essay to a journal. I warned them that the process might be slow and arduous, and that I wouldn’t help with any of it; the essay is theirs now. They were undeterred, and perhaps even a little jubilant about ousting their iron-fisted Philosopher King. The students are still working toward publishing the piece, even today, a month or so after they finished the course.
By having my students engage with me the way they might with AI, they learned to write much more efficiently and with less of an opportunity for an actual AI to intervene. On their end, the students actively participated in every class. They were constantly revising their writing and reconfiguring their arguments in conversation with me and their fellow students, and they felt they were doing real philosophy that could have a life beyond the classroom.
On my end, I saw the classroom transformed into a self-organizing collaborative space. I learned from my students about new areas of philosophical research and enjoyed their novel philosophical insights, and I had the distinct pleasure of getting to know them all much better. I would recommend this method to every college professor who wants to preserve the college essay: Stop having your students write for you, and have them write with you.
Tom Kaspers is an assistant professor in philosophy at the University of Chicago.
This article originally appeared on BostonGlobe.com on April 20, 2026.
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Reading this just made me excited - about the process. One thing that stood out to me was the idea of how we gain knowledge collectively. It's like sharpening one's mind through constant ideating, writing, and rewriting just to get to the finish line of articulating it perfectly. Doesn't just seem like one party won; Philosopher King had his hand in ensuring this win for both parties!
I would like to try it as well, but in some of my writing classes I fear that it will still be difficult to keep AI out of the individual contributions to collaborative projects.
Regardless, thank you for sharing this! It's encouraging to think through positive ways to keep students working toward the intellectual labor that matters most for their growth as writers and thinkers.