How Personalizing Assignments Gives a Clue to AI Resistant Academics

When we talk about personalization as being one of the core elements of AI-resistant academics, what we functionally mean is this: can I hear the student’s voice? No matter what you teach, your students come from a wide variety of backgrounds, home lives, cultures, personal preferences, and individual lived experiences. All of these help shape them into the kind of person they are today. It is literally what makes them them and what makes you you. It is not surprising, then, that when they are asked to complete assignments—especially those of a more creative nature—their personality, their experiences, and their voice begin to leak through. Sometimes it is in the word choices they use, the slang they prefer, and while we may not prefer it, 67 for instance can go straight into the skippity toilet for all I care, they do serve as cultural markers denoting the generation that created the work.

The reason why personalization is so essential as a marker of AI-resistant assessment, and why it is so difficult for AI to fake, is quite simple: no matter how much information a student gives the machine about themselves or their home life, it will never be able to emulate the nuances correctly. Functionally speaking, because the AI is not a person—and not only is it not a person, it is not that person—it is not your student. Of course, using AI is just a modern version of a very old academic issue: having somebody else try to complete the work for you. We will get into the psychology of why later, but for right now the crux of the matter is that the same things that make it easy to tell when somebody else has written the article for your student are the same methods we can use for determining whether an AI wrote it as well. Even if they told their robot about Grandma, about where she lived, and to write a nice report, functionally it will not sound like your student, details will be off or missing, and of course it will read like nothing they have ever written, always a dead giveaway. This is one of the reasons why in my class I always have students write their first draft by hand in their writer’s notebooks. That gives me a baseline against which I can measure future drafts.

Two great examples come to mind. One was in a written portion of a test I gave just last month. The question was simple: they were given a short poem about a bear who lived on the mountain and the person who visited the bear’s mountain, and they had to tell me what the theme of the story is. Most struggled finding the theme in a poem, which having read the poem myself I can understand why it would be difficult for my students, but one student’s work stood out. Her response to what is the theme of the poem: “A central theme of this poem is the unfettered existence of nature, specifically the bear's wild and independent life. The poem emphasizes the bear's natural instincts and its ability to thrive by sustenance in its environment.” As I am reading this I am writing down words such as unfettered existence of nature, wild and independent life, emphasizes, thrive by sustenance. It took me all of zero seconds to figure out that these were not the words used by that student, nor any student of mine. This was not their language, this was not their way of speaking, these were not words they knew nor words they knew how to utilize. And obviously when confronted she was totally unable to explain what these words meant or why she had chosen them. Always a dead giveaway to a lack of personalization. Whether she used AI or not in this particular case I was not able to determine but it was also irrelevant, the answer did not have her voice and lacked her personalization and because it did not have her voice it was an obvious fraud.

Now compare that one to an assignment I gave two years ago where students had to write a report after reading the book Green City about whether or not one should stay and rebuild after a natural disaster or whether they should move somewhere else. It was a simple argumentative paper but even ones like this which are argumentative and more factual based there is still always room for personalization to shine through. While there were hints and nuggets of noble personalization in many of the articles, one stood out to me as obviously being the voice of that student. While most of her article was similar to her peers’ lists of facts and explanations, one section stood out and it was a part of her very first draft, and I'm glad she kept it all the way through because from the very first time I read it it made me laugh. As a fairly stoic teacher this surprised my students and made them all desperately interested in what it was that she had written, which again is another strong marker of personalization in action. She wrote, “While there are some who say that after a natural disaster it’s important for a community to stay together and rebuild, I do not feel that is the case. For starters, you’re probably not that important in the community anyways and they might not notice if you left.” It is a small cold jaded statement which fit perfectly and sounded exactly like the student who wrote it. 100% authentic human.

When we encourage personalization into every academic opportunity we not only give the students a chance to contextualize that information in a way that makes sense to them, but we also encourage greater classroom participation and help them to integrate their window on the world, which as I mentioned in a previous article has gotten extremely small with most students only going between store, bed, and classroom. By adding that personalization and encouraging it at every opportunity, we can help widen that view of the world where they are integrating their personal experiences, themselves, and their voice with the window on the world that we are opening up to them in the classroom. Personalization is not just good as a tool for AI-resistant assessment, although it is also that, but foundationally personalization is a major key to getting students to buy in and invest in their own education.