Grading Questions, Not Essays

When ChatGPT can produce a competent essay on any topic in thirty seconds, the essay as a measure of student learning becomes meaningless. The essay measures second-order competence — the capacity to assemble, organize, and present — which AI now provides on demand. The question measures first-order capacity: the ability to identify what one does not know, to articulate the gap between existing understanding and the material, to open a space that requires genuine engagement. A teacher described in You On AI stopped grading essays and started grading questions. She gave students a topic and an AI tool. The assignment was to produce the five questions the student would need to ask before she could write an essay worth reading. The shift is a fundamental reorientation of what education measures, and it maps directly onto Peter Elbow's first-order/second-order distinction. Good questions cannot be outsourced to AI, because they depend on the specific configuration of a particular student's prior knowledge, confusions, and biographical relationship to the material. An AI can