AI Ate My Homework:  Big and Small Solutions for Educators Now

Cathy Davidson

Baseball cap "AI Ate My Homework"

I began my teaching career in what was the worst academic job market until the present moment. I was unemployed for three years, fired (technically, I wasn’t renewed) from my first job for hosting a women’s day that administrators felt crossed a political line. I subsequently worked various part-time jobs (including at Fermi National Accelerator Lab) and adjuncted at three different liberal arts and community colleges. When May came around, I thought I’d be going into a fourth year without a full-time job, but was lucky enough to be hired in a tenure-track job at Michigan State University, after the person originally awarded the position suddenly dropped out to take a better offer. I was ecstatic.

But all was not well. It was the height of the auto industry collapse and unemployment in Michigan was over 17%, over 25% in industrial cities like Flint. Suicide rate in MSU families soared. As the newest member of the English Department, I was assigned a First Year Expository Writing Course designed for students deemed to have remedial needs. My informal survey of the course suggested 15 of the 20 students in my class had a close family member who had lost their livelihood. And I was supposed to teach them the “five paragraph essay,” out of a standardized composition book, with a first assignment to write an essay on Pride and Prejudice.

Now, I have nothing against Jane Austen but I think the five-paragraph essay is among the most useless, unimaginative, unengaging, and (I’ll say it again) useless ways to write in the world—and writing an essay about matchmaking among the landed gentry in late 18th century England felt especially cruel during a total economic meltdown in middle America. I was already an advocate of active, engaged pedagogy but there weren’t many guides to active learning at the time (except of course Montessori, Dewey, and a friend who had recently changed her name from Gloria Watkins to “bell hooks”—although Teaching to Transgress was still several years in the future). I knew of no equivalent back then of John Warner’s splendid book Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities (2018). Still, I could not bear teaching something irrelevant to those wonderful, mostly first-generation MSU students (and they were truly wonderful: I still hear from a number of them today!). I could not waste their time on educational methods I deemed useless and counter-productive, not when their families had scraped together all their funds to pay for tuition so their children would be educated . . . and wouldn’t have to work in the precarious auto industry.

I turned Expository Writing into a job clinic and, in the process, everyone learned how to elevate their writing. They all composed formal letters, applying for jobs and for paid internships, and learned everything from proper grammar to persuasive techniques. After all, they were looking for paid work in a devastated market. They also wrote resumes and learned how to inventory their own skills and assemble them professionally in a concise and compelling resume. I promised a grade of “A” to anyone who applied for and then successfully landed a job or paid internship for the coming summer.

The steps I used in that class became a blueprint for all the decades I’ve taught since then. In the Age of AI, all the active learning techniques I used then are proving to be more useful than ever. Those pedagogical tactics include engaged, experiential learning, peer review and peer feedback, public (oral) presentation of one’s work, group work, and some kind of public contribution to knowledge. I have used all of these, in one way or another, in practically every class I’ve taught since then (whether “American Culture and Society 1865-1910” or “This Is Your Brain on the Internet”). 

In this blog, I will outline the specific things I did in this class taught 30 some years ago but that remain even more relevant today. Remember, this class was conducted before there was LinkedIn or even public access to the internet. Only rare students had a laptop or used email. Yet I’ve adapted many of these same steps and principles in all of my courses, both face to face and virtually. ALL, literally all of these activites, can be translated into parallel exercises and assignments that can be used at any teaching level, in any subject today, in the Age of AI. Everything here is rooted firmly in the principles of what is variously called active learning, engaged learning, radical pedagogy, or critical pedagogy. My conviction (supported by deep research and data): Active learning is a superior form of deep, meaningful learning with lessons that last a lifetime. Period. And active learning is even more important in the Age of AI.

As a special bonus, at the end of my blog, I have permission from the brilliant Fordham Professor Jordan Stein to post his syllabus and his final exam for his Senior class “On Work” that exemplifies many of these principles. My examples below connect what I did in my first course to the Age of AI but, even better, Jordan’s syllabus is brand new and speaks directly to our moment. I am positive that you will find much in Jordan’ Stein’s syllabus and final paper assignment that you can learn from and adapt in your own courses.

Step by adaptable step, here’s what I did in that first Expository Writing class in order to move from the “sage on the stage” to active, engaged, peer, and collaborative learning (including much that cannot be done by AI as well as some that can be done by using AI as a tool):

  • I rewrote the required syllabus to explain “why” this course was important, that everything we did in this class would have “meta” implications to their lives. (Having now read literally thousands of syllabi on the Open Syllabus project, I know that this is very rare: most of us never explain why our specialized subject matter has deep and lasting relevance to out students’ futures, whatever those futures may be.) I underscored that students in this class would learn not just writing skills but they would learn how to learn—alone, together, taking feedback from peers, learning to incorporate that feedback, learning not just from experts but learning how to become experts themselves.  This is crucial in the Age of AI—so much research shows how students feel increasingly disempowered by AI (and by the grim labor prospects that face them). Agency is crucial in higher ed, and higher ed–as I’ve said in many books and articles–is not very good at transferring agency from experts to students, helping them feel empowered by their education. This was true before AI and it is crucial now). Empowerment through learning is the most fundamental aspect of all active, radical, engaged pedagogy. AI is about shifting empowerment from humans to automated systems, from students’ own thinking and ideas to feeling its just easier and safer to as ChatGPT or Claude to do one’s thinking for one. This is entirely self-defeating . . . but students need to figure this out for themselves to be convinced. There’s a powerful propaganda machine–and a social media panoptican–telling them otherwise.
  • I brought in the Career Services professionals to lecture on a great job letter and a strong resume—even for beginners—and had them leave about twenty sample resumes and job letters for students to learn from and use as a template. Important: I asked them to leave both great resumes and job letters and terrible ones so students could see the difference for themselves. (The Age of AI analogy: why not have students use AI to write intentionally bad or ridiculous job letters and resumes–the best way I know to show students the limits of AI is to challenge them to create scripts for ChatGPT that expose its faults. A favorite currently on TikTok is someone who asks a chatbot: “What does the ‘R’ stand for in ‘ChatGPT’” and the chatbot chatters away telling the meaning of the non-existent R, even when challenged many times. We learn from such fails!)
  • In class, students wrote interview questions together (guided by the resume templates) and interviewed one another in groups about their likes, aspirations, skills, and helped one another assemble material for resumes. The Age of AI relevance: anything that requires interaction, peer exchange and mentorship, renders AI irrelevant or merely supplementary. Also, make sure to underscore the “meta”: employers appreciate collaboration and team work. After this exercise, I suggest everyone add “experienced and skillful team player” to their resume. It’s also a great example for them to use in future job interviews.
  • They wrote a list of criteria (again inspired by the Career Services person) of skills and personal qualities that employers esteem.  (Today: Take a look at NACE list for examples of what employers are looking for). Researchers today say only about 25% of students use Career Services: At some point in my career, I began scheduling one day, often when I had to be away for a conference, where someone from Career Services come into my class. This is crucial for the students and also exceptionally effective for the Career Services professionals: a captive audience!)
  • They wrote crude, fast first drafts of letters and resumes for the next class (crucial in the Age of AI: students could see their own progress . . . today, I’d make this an in-class exercise.)
  • They worked in groups or pairs to give feedback on each others’ work and used what we would now call a “badging system” to give a badge to everything they found convincing and that didn’t need changing. (In badging, you never give an F, you don’t “fail” a person; you just reward the things that impress you. Badging is far more effective than grading. It gives feedback on what is working, motivating you to bring the rest of your work up to that level. It sets the bar high, at success, rather than harping on failure.)
  • They then wrote a revised version, incorporating their peers’ feedback–and then showed it to their peers, making sure they took the feedback well and thanking them for the contribution. Gratitude and peer bonding are crucial; learning is social.
  • In the Age of AI, this would be a great time to have students submit their revised assignment to an AI tool for improvement. (Show them how to work with AI and use it as a tool, not be a tool of AI… “AI slop” is easily detected… of course also talk about AI detectors!)
  • Students then presented their resumes and job letters in oral class presentations—and other students asked follow-up questions.  These were practice interviews, in effect, and essential in the Age of AI: you can’t really cheat on an oral presentation.
  • When students felt confident, I added a component which has become something of a trademark in many courses I’ve taught over the years: A Public Contribution to Knowledge. This was pre-Internet, so we couldn’t do this as a crowdsourced public service, with open source posts on HASTAC.  Instead, students in the course decided to organize a one-day conference—a Job Clinic–and they did everything: the programming, communications, invitations. Everyone was given a title–and, yes, that title went straight onto their resumes too. They even invited some local business people to be on a panel. As I recall, about 40 MSU students came. One “returning student,” a laid-off auto worker, had a session for other laid-off workers. About a dozen men and women participated. They discussed resumes with career professionals invited for that purpose and, because this session was free, they in turn volunteered to give students advice based on their own experience in the workforce: they talked about self presentation, manners, interview skills, and other “adult” qualities. It was a huge success. (Needless to say, anything public like this can be a great form of assessment… and isn’t remotely about AI. My one problem–and I’d love anyone who has more experience with this than I: recently, when I proposed to students I was meeting with at another campus that they video and upload their extra-classroom projects, they balked: social media is cruel. They did not want to be exposed to trash talk, mockery, or cruelty of the social media panopticon. I can’t blame them. And I don’t have a good workaround. Anyone have any ideas here?
  • And the final exam: everyone was required, as a final exam, to send out five letters to real employers for real summer jobs and internships. I supplied the stamps (a modest form of generosity and collaboration–that also made checking off who was doing the assignment easy). A few students ended up getting internships with the business people who they had invited to be on the panel at the student conference.
  • Moral of the Story #1:  Every student in the “remedial” writing class had some form of paid work or internship as a result of that class. Every one. They all earned their A.
  • Moral of the Story #2: They all learned to write a “five paragraph essay”—the basic form of a job letter, but with a purpose, an audience, a tactic, a mission: all the things a vapid “five paragraph essay on Jane Austen” lacks.
  • Moral of the Story #3: I was almost fired. I was reprimanded for not using the required textbook, for being derisive about learning how to write without their being a clear audience and purpose (I still detest it and believe it teaches students to hate writing), for having students do “useless” work like organize and orchestrate a conference, and for giving everyone As.  Because I’d won a teaching prize and had a book under contract—and because I had two fabulous mentors at MSU, Russ Nye and Linda Wagner-Martin who stood up for me, I wasn’t fired but I wasn’t allowed to teach composition again.
  • Moral of the Story #4: It made me more determined than ever. You can read about it in The New Education: How To Revolutionize the University To Prepare Students for a World in Flux (Basic Books)  and The New College Classroom, a book co-written with brilliant Christina Katapodis, each of which won the AAC&U “best book of the year award.”  (Moral of the Story:  Fight for what you believe in).

Age of AI Moral:  Every single part of this old assignment is adaptable to every kind of classroom, at every level (K-postdoc), in any field. It’s about demonstrating how active, engaged, relevant learning that pays off.  The biggest theft from students plagiarizing with AI is that it reinforces the idea that college is only about getting the grades, not preparing you for everything else in life. If students plagiarize, it is because they have learned very well the most cynical aspects of grade-grubbing, multiple choice thinking, getting the right answer, getting ahead.  AI is a very efficient way of doing that. And unless you make AI your tool, it robs you of agency, critical thinking, creativity, responsibility, and a sense of your own empowerment.  Period.

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ChatGPT Ate My Homework: What Educators Need To Know About Generative AI by Alym Amlani and Paul Davis

In their very useful and accessible book, ChatGPT Ate My Homework: What Educators Need To Know About Generative AI , accountant and data specialists Alym Amlani and Paul Davis begin with the premise that students today are almost all using AI to do their assignments and what we need is better assignments and better ways that students can use AI productively. “There’s a new cyborg in our classroom. It’s called MePT (mee-pee-tee, rhymes with GPT). This is a new term which we coined to describe the GPT-human cyborg, first published by Davis (2025). Less than three years after ChatGPT became freely available, almost every student with a smartphone is using Generative AI (Gen AI) on a regular basis. With the normalcy of accounting students using calculators and Excel, students in every discipline have extended their human capabilities, adopting Gen AI like a mental pacemaker.” Amlani and Davis are not die-hard active learning theorists and practitioners in the same way that I am but they offer any educator sensible, usable tactics to make AI work for students (and their profs).

BONUS:

I have tried to connect my ancient story of active learning to the Age of AI. But here’s something even better: My friend Jordan Stein, a Professor at Fordham University, has kindly allowed me to share his syllabus and final exam in this blog. He teaches an absolutely brilliant Senior Values course “On Work.” Really brilliant. Look and learn! (And thank you, Jordan!)

JORDAN STEIN

HPLC 4050: Senior Values, “On Work”                                                               Prof. Jordan Stein

Spring 2026, T 2:30–5p, LL 1104                                                                        Office: LL 925G

Office Hours: before class and by appointment                                                

Required books (purchase online)

Cathy N. Davidson, The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a 

World In Flux, updated edition (Basic Books, 2022). 9781541601277

Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience [1873] (Penguin, 1994). 9780140390919

Leigh Claire La Berge, Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism Is a Joke (Haymarket, 2025). 

9798888903674

Additional required readings available in the course library and hyperlinked below

            Students are required to bring readings to each class

             Rationale:

A college education, according to a spate of posts on Reddit, is “bullshit.” According to sociologists of labor and political economy, so are many contemporary jobs. At a moment when higher education and wage labor in the US are both experiencing existential and political-economic crises, it is time to reexamine the connections between them. In our contemporary circumstances, what should the relationship between education and work be?

To answer this question, this interdisciplinary seminar will take a broad survey of classic and contemporary texts in educational theory, economics, sociology, psychology, literature, philosophy, and journalism. These different disciplinary approaches will encourage us to think about education and work from multiple angles. Along the way, we’ll think about what makes work meaningful and what kinds of connections we as individuals might want to make between what we learn and what we do with what we learn. These questions will also point our class discussions toward reflections on the contexts for learning and earning––what we bring (race, gender, experience), and what is given to us (curricula, credentials, funding, the economy).

Course Requirements:

Attendance and active participation –– this is a discussion-based class

In-class presentation [sign ups here]

Presentation write-up [turn in here]

Final essay [prompt and submission info here]

            Evaluation:

All assignments will be graded pass/fail. Students who complete all assignments (including class participation) will earn an A for the semester. Students who do not complete required work will earn a B or lower, in proportion to the amount of work incomplete.

Course Platform: 

Course materials (e.g. syllabus, handouts, readings in .pdf, folders to turn in work) will be stored on Google Drive and not on Blackboard. Everything you need should be (or will be) linked off this syllabus; consider bookmarking it. Email communication goes to whichever address students have registered with the University. If you prefer to use a different email address, please notify the professor ASAP.

All assignments should be submitted to the appropriate folder here (log in with fordham.edu address).

            Assignment Schedule (subject to minor modifications as the semester gets underway):

1/13     – Week 1: Is college bullshit?

1/20     – Week 2: How do things (like work and education) fit together? The ‘wicked problem’ model

Bedriftsøkonomen 8 (1972): 390–396.

Management Review 1.1 (2000): 1–19.

639–651.

1/27     – Week 3: What is a college education, and what’s it for?

  • Cathy N. Davidson, The New Education, chs. 1-4

2/3       – Week 4: What is a college education, and what’s it for? (continued)

  • Cathy N. Davidson, The New Education, chs. 5-8

2/10     – Week 5: What is work? What is anti-work?

Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Falling Wall Press, 1972), 21–56.

2/17     – classes follow a M schedule 

2/24     – Week 6: What makes work meaningful?

  • Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience, chaps 1–9 (to p. 169 in Penguin ed.) [LibriVox audiobook]

3/3       – Week 7: What makes work meaningful? (continued)

3/10     – spring break 

3/17     – Week 8: What is innovation? What is its relationship to creativity?

3/24     – Week 9: How can we innovate work? For example, the University:

Recommended:

3/31     –  Week 10: Are jobs fake?

  • Leigh Claire La Berge, Fake Work, to p. 107

4/7       – Week 11: Are jobs fake? (continued)

  • Leigh Claire La Berge, Fake Work, to end

4/14     – Week 12: 

  • In class: discussion of final exam

4/21     – Week 13: no class meeting

4/28     – Week 14: conclusions

  • In class: presentations on final topics

Final papers will be due at the end of the final exam period set by FCLC: 

Tuesday, May 5, no later than 3:30p. 

Turn in your papers here.

Assignment is 100% take-home.

Discussion-Based Learning:

In our meetings this semester, we’ll engage in discussion-based learning. Your task is to do the assignments and come to class prepared with comments and questions; we’ll then work collaboratively to develop our understanding of the material. This kind of learning is open-ended––it can involve questions that don’t have right answers, relating personal experiences or associations, or non-linear thinking. For this reason, many students don’t immediately recognize it as a serious learning practice, but as the weeks go on, you will see that together we will uncover new information and come to conclusions that we would not have arrived at individually. Discussion-based learning is a style that challenges students to be responsible for their own education and rewards you for working together.

Attendance Policy:

Students are generally expected to attend class. If you are not able to (due to access of whatever kind, due to time zones, due to illness, or due religious observance, etc.), please notify the professor via email during the first week of class or whenever your circumstances change. 

            Classroom Conduct and the University Mission:

Our classroom space is an anti-racist space. It is designed to be inclusive, on the assumption that we all do our best work when we feel welcome, seen, and respected. It is also a space for thinking about the social and structural forces that make other spaces non-inclusive. We’re studying the history of how literature has been studied and taught, and that is bound up with racist practices inside and outside the university that we will try to identify, name, process, and begin to move beyond.

Anti-racist pedagogy lines up with the Ignatian values of Jesuit education: to teach the whole person, mind, body, and spirit. Fordham’s mission includes values such as a “commitment to research and education that assist in the alleviation of poverty, the promotion of justice, the protection of human rights, and respect for the environment.” Members of this class can expect to continue an education that promotes “understanding of and reverence for ways of life other than their own,” and to continue their preparation “to live in and to contribute to an increasingly multicultural and multinational society.” As with all courses of study at Fordham, the aim of ours is to foster “life-long habits of careful observation, critical thinking, creativity, moral reflection, and articulate expression.” 

Pronoun Policy:

All students will be addressed by the name and pronouns they prefer. If your chosen name is not identical to the one in the University’s records, you may change it at any time. Students will not be asked to share pronouns with the class, but anyone is free to do so voluntarily, and the information you choose to share will be taken up in class.

            University Statement on Disability:

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973, all students, with or without disabilities, are entitled to equal access to the programs and activities of Fordham University. If you believe that you have a disability that may interfere with your ability to participate in the activities, coursework, or assessment of the object of this course, you may be entitled to accommodations. Please schedule a meeting to speak with someone at the Office of Disability Services.

            Tutoring Services:

At Lincoln Center, for students needing assistance with particular subjects, free tutoring help is available. Specific departments offer faculty tutoring. Tutoring is available for: Mathematics, Language Learning Center, Economics, Computer Science, and Writing. Learn more about tutoring at Lincoln Center here, and at Rose Hill here. 

Information about the University Writing Center (including how to make an appointment) is available here.

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