Socrates Never Wrote a Term Paper

"In the ChatGPT era, evaluating student performance through traditional term papers no longer makes sense. The best solution to this most modern of dilemmas is a return to the past. There's no need to seek out a technological remedy when history's oldest teaching style points to a better way.

When the Socratic method is used in place of lecturing, students are forced to trade their passive role in the classroom for an active one in which participation is the primary measure of mastery. Named for Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher, the Socratic method employs skillful questioning to test the limits of each student's grasp of the material while the instructor and students explore the difficult ideas and concepts together.

It has been used to varying degrees at elite institutions including Oxford, Cambridge and even the University of Chicago School of Law. In recent times, Socratic techniques have been most fully realized at the likes of Thomas Aquinas College and St. John's College, small institutions that follow a single course of study grounded in the original liberal arts -- arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, rhetoric, grammar and logic. These colleges are leading the movement to revive the classical approach, and schools that follow are rewarded with surging enrollment when national enrollment has dropped 13%.

ChatGPT is far from foolproof at the moment, but when it's set up properly, the computer-generated term paper will be indistinguishable from something a student would write, or, for that matter, what a professor might write in a scientific paper.

Some have proposed the use of AI-detection programs to identify students attempting to pass off machine-generated content as their own. To the extent that AI content has a recognizable fingerprint, this may indeed work -- for a time. That will only invite an arms race between AI content generators and AI-detection algorithms. Detectors are unlikely to emerge as the winners.

The more permanent fix would be to rethink the way teachers judge a student's mastery of classroom material and come up with an option that doesn't rely on essay writing.

The essay hasn't been banished from classically minded institutions. Rather, the more personalized, discussion-centric model of instruction by its nature renders essays a secondary tool. Students that skip their homework won't be able to hide for long when asked to offer an opinion on last night's reading.

For centuries, the classical curriculum was the norm, rather than the exception. In the modern era, however, the march toward factory-style education replaced the old ways with more specialized studies delivered in lecture form. Perhaps it's time to rethink this change. The classical method survived as long as it did because it fostered critical-thinking skills that can then be applied to any category of specialized study.

In the years to come, AI chatbots may prove useful for more than enabling spammers and lazy students. If the AI threat convinces school administrators to embrace the classics, the machines will have performed a service to humanity.

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Mr. Tate is the founder and CEO of the Classic Learning Test, a humanities-focused alternative to the SAT and ACT." [1]

1. Socrates Never Wrote a Term Paper
Tate, Jeremy.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 06 Feb 2023: A.15.