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Comment by TSiege | Hacker News Reader

I'd really disagree with this. Essay writing forces a person to think critically. You have to construct an argument for or against something. Even if it's echoing source material or a teacher, you still have to think in a way that other testing formats do not.

By offloading this to a machine the students are undercutting themselves more than anything else. They'll be less effective communicators and less capable of disagreeing with ideas and concepts the face in the real world

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Eh, once you get the pattern down it becomes almost a rote operation. Especially for a 2-3 page paper. You find 3-4 facts/arguments to support your conclusion and turn them into paragraphs. Slap on an intro & conclusion pre/re-stating your 3-4 points and you're done.

Good ol hamburger format, never fails.

In my required college 1st year writing class I had to read a lot of my peers' writing. Most people have not learned how to do this. They do not understand the concept of stating a premise and then supporting it with evidence.

“Once you get the pattern down”, just like learning other subjects like math? But many kids don’t have it down. And there are gradations in complexity. An 8th grader who’s got it down and a 12 grader who’s got it down will produce different artifacts and should have different assignments.

I agree with you, but I also had instructors who demanded the same thing: essays as arguments, drawing on evidence and analysis to back up a thesis.

An essay that is simply a description of the source material, or a listing of pros and cons with no actual thesis, is a totally different endeavor, and one that has much less value as method of instruction or assessment.

If there is no thesis statement, then it isn't really an essay; just a book report.

Restating or paraphrasing a widely accepted thesis statement isn't very educational? When your freshman class of 200 students is writing essays on a handful of topics, the same ones every year, that every other school touches on, there's not going to much in the way of originality.

Then again I guess the same argument can be made for maths but no one complains that we're teaching to memorize and repeat the same steps of various proofs one learns in 1st year.

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