TBR AI EXCHANGE
Submission Date
Submitter’s Name/Email
Institution/School
Department/Discipline
Activity Purpose (assessment, data collection, classroom management, etc.)
AI Tool(s)
Activity Details
In first-year composition courses, students often struggle to evaluate the quality of their own writing and to move beyond surface-level revisions. At the same time, increasing access to AI tools has led many students to treat AI-generated responses as acceptable finished work, even when those responses are generic, underdeveloped, or only partially accurate.
The instructional goal of this use case is to address both challenges by reframing AI as an object of analysis rather than a source of answers. The aim is to strengthen students’ ability to evaluate writing, recognize limitations in AI-generated text, and develop more sophisticated revision practices while maintaining student authorship and academic integrity.
Students complete a structured, multi-step assignment:
Students respond to a prompt in their journals for classroom settings or in a discussion post for online settings.
Students input the same prompt with basic notes into an AI tool to generate a comparable response.
Students evaluate both texts using specific criteria that resemble class rubrics:
Students identify where the AI response is:
Students revise their initial writing and choose whether to incorporate anything from the AI response. Revisions must demonstrate improvement in the criteria listed above.
After revising, students submit a document with their initial writing, the initial AI output, and their final revision. This step also allows the instructor to note when and how Turnitin evaluates and flags AI use, which can be shared with students who are interested.
Students submit a short reflection as a separate assignment discussing their experience of this activity, what they noticed about AI writing, and what they noticed about blending their own writing with AI writing.
Comments
Students are increasingly quick at spotting the tell-tale signs of AI writing, such as gerunds, lists of three, and dashes, and they often disparage it. However, many cannot as easily spot what is lacking from the content or meaning of the writing itself.
This assignment asks them to look at the quality of AI-generated ideas and analysis as well. They often assume AI must have better ideas than they do, and this assignment helps them shift from passive acceptance to a more critical and analytical mindset when using AI tools.