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Gender studies professor says 20% limit is ‘outlier’
Students can use ChatGPT to write up to 20 percent of their essays in a “writing intensive” course at Texas A & M University.
The course, titled “Communication and Black Freedom Dreams,” counts as a Writing Intensive class. Every student at the public university must take two courses with this designation.
The course examines “Black freedom rhetorical traditions in the 19th and 20th century.
“Learning Outcomes” for the course include a student’s ability to “select and discuss a laudable articulation of a ‘Black freedom dream’” and “produce written essays that effectively respond to a defined rhetorical context.”
While the “Reading Engagement” assignments strictly prohibit AI, the “Writing Component,” which accounts for 50 percent of the total grade, allows for assistance from ChatGPT or Grok or other similar programs. These essays are 750 to 1000 words, meaning someone could have AI write 200 words of their essay and still fall within the guidelines.
Kristan Poirot, the course’s professor, told The Fix that this policy is “based on the idea” that she wants to “produce a context where students have some freedom to honestly express how and when they are using AI.”
She writes and researches about “feminist theory” and gender studies within the journalism department. She is an administrator within that department and also teaches within the Africana Studies program, according to her faculty bio.
The professor said in her classroom she will “talk frankly about the problems and potential benefits in using AI to aid in writing,” and emphasizes “that one must learn how to write before one can learn how to write with generative AI.”
Regarding the specific threshold, the professor acknowledged the figure is experimental.
“Honestly, the 20% threshold was kind of a random choice,” the professor explained.
“I do ask that they base it off of word count when generative AI is generating whole sentences and/or key phrasing,” she said.
She told The Fix that most humanities professors maintain a strict prohibition on AI-generated text to “produce prose,” making her “an outlier with the 20%.”
When asked about the role of equity and the development of student voices in a course rooted in lived experience, Poirot stated that “equity did not not play a part in my decision making,” noting however that she does “work with students individually to help them articulate and ‘find’ their voice in writing.”
She tries to help students “‘find’ their voice in writing” by having them “highlight what AI has written,” and then “compare to their own words, and analyze ‘who’ did better and how.”
A writer and editor with an academic reform group questioned the long-term impact on academic rigor and the integrity of “Writing Intensive” courses, if AI is allowed to be used to this extent.
Jared Gould, managing editor of Minding the Campus, said “AI can be useful at the margins.” His publication is under the National Association of Scholars, which works to restore standards to higher education.
“But the assumption underlying this syllabus—that students will confine their use to those narrow purposes it outlines—is just not serious,” he said. Gould has written before about the pitfalls of using AI.
Gould told The Fix, “in practice, students are not using AI as a supplement; they’re using it as a substitute.”
He said “if a meaningful part of the writing process—like the thinking—can be handed off to a machine, it’s hard to see what exactly is left that makes the writing course ‘writing intensive.’”
The editor also raised concerns regarding the inherent bias within AI training data.
“On creativity, I don’t see how institutions can treat AI as meaningfully creative,’” Gould said, stating that systems like AI “don’t generate ideas,” but rather “repackage existing ones based on patterns in their training data.”
“Worse,” he says, “AI is biased,” having a “leftist tilt.”
Consequently, Gould explains that students are “less likely to do the hard work of thinking for themselves,” and that whatever AI generates for them will “tend to reinforce the same ideas they are already getting on campus.”
The designation as “writing intensive” illustrates the decline in higher education standards over the years, Gould said.
“Students have been passing courses without demonstrating strong writing or analytical ability well before AI entered the picture, he said.
“[I]f anything, AI ensures that whatever minimal work was done before it becomes even more minimal now.”
MORE: Yale English professors use printed readings to combat AI
