this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2026
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If LLMs are going to improve society in any way, it'll be killing the delusion that writing MLA formatted essays has anything to do with education.
And yet being able to shows that a student can follow simple.instructions, review formatting and their own output, and not need to consult a slop machine that's contributing to techbro oligarchy and environmental destruction.
Why are we concerned about university students' ability to follow simple instructions? Was that not taught and tested at some point during the 13 years of public school they had to complete to be here?
If you want to follow instructions, enlist in the army and go to boot camp. If you want to think for yourself, go to college. Or so I was told.
Essay writing is supposed to be an exercise in research; the critical skills are supposed to be finding sources for information, validating their credibility, and drawing supportable conclusions. That takes critical thinking and logic skills. Which is not part of the curriculum. Go take a college English class, turn in an essay, get your grade back, your teacher will have graded you on punctuation, spelling, grammar, MLA formatting. Name of the periodical should be in italics, not underlined -5 pts.
And...I get it. It's harder to teach critical thinking. It's WAY harder to grade critical thinking. So they don't try; they give tests designed to test rote memorization and essays that if we're honest are busywork, assigned by English majors who have no other career prospects.
I could also go into how defining "credible scientific research" as "rigidly formatted per this published style guide" is a recipe for manufacturing bullshit; you want people to believe the Earth is flat? Write about it in MLA.
Woe is you, being asked to prove you learned anything, open book and at a time and place you decide on. Skill issue.
Based on that description of an essay, I don't think you've been to college.
Writing an essay isn't supposed to be a test of what the student has learned; it's a test of what the student has found out.
Essay writing is (theoretically) an exercise in research. Maybe you'll do primary research via the scientific method, conducting and reporting on experiments, but vastly more likely you're supposed to find essays written by other researchers and cite their work, drawing conclusions based on their data.
Doing this properly requires critical thinking and logic skills...which they don't bother to teach. Instead, they focus mainly on the clerical aspects of the assignment; focusing more on font selection and document formatting than the actual content of the ideas.
What is a take-home open-book test other than busywork? I'm a flight instructor, I teach people how to fly airplanes. I don't care how much or how little time a student studies, they've got to show me they can fly the airplane before I send them to the examiner. College professors seem to approach their job as "How can I make this hard on my students?" I've always seen my job as "How can I make this easier for my students?" Because my job is to teach a skill, not gatekeep a decent living.