No longer an accurate assessment of a student’s literary ability, school essays have been reduced to competitions between ChatGPT and week-long stressing. Whether it is wasting class time in English. Students know AI can write their essays for them, or spend hours on a history paper because students are unable to work under deadlines, and out-of-class essays fail to teach students the necessary time management and critical thinking skills. To prevent cheating and to train students to work under pressure, all school essays should be timed.
The rise of artificial intelligence programs like EssayService.ai, which can generate an essay with just one prompt, means that take-home essays are increasingly plagiarized. It also undermines the work of those whose essays are genuine. Why spend hours planning when a machine can compose an essay that will receive the same grade? Although cheating is never completely preventable, forcing students to write essays in class gives teachers more opportunities to catch cheating. Requiring essays to be written in school deters cheaters in the first place because teachers can monitor the process.
Further, writing essays in a timed setting prepares students for instances where they will need to demonstrate their comprehension without outside tools. Allowing students to spend weeks preparing an essay inevitably means the use of SparkNotes rather than active listening, and Google searches instead of conversations about the literature. Why pay attention in class in the first place if you could just go home and research the answers? Timed essay writing forces students to utilize knowledge learned in class and quickly produce ideas on their own, rather than relying on the internet. It teaches how to productively plan, write, and revise under pressure – something that take-home essays could never do. Forcing students to perform under a time limit strips away any distractions and procrastination that come with assigning an essay over the weekend, meaning students spend the entire class period focused and working.
Placing time constraints on essays also means students can complete more essays over the same amount of time. Letting essays turn into a month-long process, like a group project instead of what it should be – an assessment – means students procrastinate, knowing they have weeks until the essay is due. The essay portion of a book in English often takes longer than reading the book itself. Worse, the large gap between the last and most recent essays means students are less likely to remember and apply corrections. Timed essays mean just one class period dedicated to writing instead of a month.
Opponents may cite stress caused by time restraints; however, an essay that takes weeks to complete causes more strain. Students who tend to be stressed by time limits are also those who overwork themselves due to the vague outlines and perfectionism demanded by big projects like take-home essays. With no way of knowing what the teacher expects, students believe that to receive a good grade, they must spend hours every day on said essay. This constant raising of the bar causes time-based stress: students are so used to having weeks to write that they worry they cannot reach their “best” if given a short deadline.
In the long run, timed essays in school instead of take-home essays teach students permanent skills such as time management and concise writing. To prepare students for life outside classrooms, schools need to be teaching students to perform just as well in an hour as in a week.