CONCEPT
Grading Questions Instead of Answers
The pedagogical inversion that responds to AI's commoditization of answers by assessing the quality of a student's inquiry rather than the fluency of her output.
Grading questions instead of answers names the pedagogical reorientation that responds to AI's commoditization of correct-answer production. When any student can produce a competent essay using an AI tool, the essay ceases to function as an assessment of understanding; it becomes an assessment of tool operation. By shifting assessment from essay production to question formulation, the teacher restores the evaluative function the technology disrupted. A good question requires understanding what one does not understand — a more demanding cognitive operation than demonstrating what one does understand.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Segal describes the paradigmatic case in You On AI: a teacher who stopped grading her students' essays and started grading their questions. She gave the class a topic and an AI tool. The assignment was not to produce an essay but to produce the five questions one would need to ask before writing an essay worth reading. The students who produced the best questions demonstrated the deepest engagement with the