Raise the Bar Until Someone Wants It

Originally written in Traditional Chinese: 難度全部往上調，調到有人想要為止

This week I joined Chang Hsiu-hsiu on his show Abnormal Human Research Institute for a long conversation (in Mandarin) about what schoolwork should look like in the age of AI.

The episode title quotes me: work is good enough when someone would actually want to buy it.

People have asked what homework has to do with buying. Fair question. That line was the second half of the argument. The first half was this: raise the difficulty of everything.

Here is why. When generative AI first reached our campus, one class turned in essays that were suddenly brilliant. Every single one. They had been written at home. We asked the same students to write on the same prompt again, in class. Almost none of them held up. From that day on, writing happened in the classroom.

The students were not cheating because they were bad kids. They were doing what years of exam training taught them: find the single right answer in the shortest possible time. Give that habit an AI tool and it goes straight for the answer. But the most valuable part of writing is not the answer. It is the struggle of arranging ideas in your own head. Psychologist Robert Bjork calls this kind of effort a desirable difficulty: the harder you work to learn something, the longer it stays.

Pulling writing back into the classroom stopped the bleeding. It is not the solution. At Minerva, one professor assigned close to 400 pages of pre-class reading overnight and told us, in effect: I expect you to use AI, and I designed this assuming you will. That is the shift. Do not ban AI. Assume students will use it, then raise the bar.

If AI can produce 60 or 70 out of 100 in seconds, 60 is no longer a pass. It is a starting point. And the new ceiling is simple: a real person wants what you made.

Three things parents and teachers can try this week:

  1. Talk before writing. Ask students to explain out loud what goes in paragraph one and paragraph two before they open any tool.
  2. Treat the AI draft as a 60. Ask: where is this not good enough, and how would you make it better?
  3. Give the work a real reader. Who would actually use this?

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References