Barry Lam is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside.
American football is a low-discretion sport. Low-discretion sports are designed so that referees, umpires, and judges do not have a significant say on the outcome of a match. How many points are scored depends on the rules of scoring. How many yards per penalty, or what happens on ball four, is almost entirely determined by rules.
Other sports are high-discretion. Consider gymnastics, diving, and figure skating. The outcomes depend almost entirely on the judgments of human beings and their verdicts.
Some sports are no-discretion sports. Swimming and track, for instance, have automated away what little need they had for human referees. Automated touch sensors, quick-shutter cameras, and digital timers now account for the entirety of race refereeing.
What is true of sports is also true of college-level teaching. Some subject matters are supposed to be low-discretion; either you know how to compute a derivative or run an ANOVA analysis, or you do not. The instructor’s grading standards are not supposed to have a significant say on the grade on the exam. Other subject matters are high-discretion, like asking a student to provide an analysis of a passage, or to make and support an argument about the importance of a certain event in history. For essays or oral presentations, what you assign, how you assign it, and then how you score the completed assignment is far more like scoring a gymnastics floor routine than like timing a swim race.
The era of automation and standardization associated with new technology, like AI, and the demands of the economy of higher education have raised the question of how much those of us in high-discretion subjects should make use of standardized evaluation techniques. My institution is demanding that humanities departments consider the prospect of significantly fewer graduate students, and therefore fewer TAs for large courses where they read and grade student writing. This demand requires us to consider transforming our assignments and means of assessment from high- to low-discretion methods: in other words, to established and fixed curriculum, Scantron exams, and grading by AI.
High-discretion is a feature, not a bug, of our fields. If we are to push back, we need to articulate to administrators and to students the value of high-discretion institutions more generally. We live in an era of high mistrust of specialists and experts, including college-level instructors. The tech industry is making very big promises to everyone that replacing human decision-making with machine decision-making will solve the major problems facing education in high-discretion subjects. You can educate large numbers of people at scale for low cost with fewer humans and fewer human judgments that are biased, err, and cheat students out of fair assessment, the tech companies claim.
In my book Fewer Rules, Better People, I articulate a series of arguments about the value of high-discretion activities in institutions of scale and mistrust. Those arguments apply equally well to education and college-level teaching. High-discretion rules, high-discretion assignments, high-discretion grading; these can be less fair and uniform across students, but they train students in independent thinking and foster virtuous, prosocial thinking, and virtuous, prosocial judgment.
A paper assignment asking a student to do a high-discretionary act, like “Select an idea in a chapter that is consequential to an argument I have presented in class,” requires the student to think about what counts as consequential and why they think that, and also guess about what you as the instructor will consider consequential. Students take a risk by making their own choices. An assignment that asks them to do a low-discretionary act, like “Write about the second formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative and whether it is equivalent to the first,” has no such risk, but hand-feeds a student your conception of the consequential and important. The best outcome is to give a student a high-discretionary act that they succeed at. Such an assignment asks the student to find alternative conceptions of “interesting” and “consequential” to your own.
Philosophy is full of these possible options and their associated risks. The aim of ethics, for instance, is to get students to think about moral questions beyond the standard talking points they hear on social media. Asking them to choose a moral question all over social media, like the ethics of self-defense, and make an important argument about it that the commentariat has missed, is a high-discretionary assignment. This ask does not shy away from the use of normative and value-laden language, like “important,” which resists clean, standardized interpretation, but is absolutely essential in academic judgment. Students never cultivate independent and novel conceptions of the important without being allowed to exercise discretionary judgment.
Even something as simple as discretion about the word limit of an assignment fosters independent thinking. “Write a paper of about 1,200 words” requires a certain amount of student discretion, and “Write an essay using only as many words as necessary” requires even more. With the first instruction, a student must think about whether they’ve said enough with 1,100 words, or whether they’ve said too much at 1,400. The “only as many words as necessary” instruction essentially asks the student to proofread a draft to make sure every word is justified or whether something can be said more concisely. This kind of thinking is what we want to foster in higher education. Students will not only learn content and learn to write content; they will also learn to exercise a kind of judgment about the manner of their own expression.
The move from high- to low-discretion not only standardizes education, but also standardizes achievement in education in a truly unfortunate way. Instructors in high-discretion fields should embrace that feature, exercising high discretion with respect to assignments, curriculum, and grading standards. Everyone who has taught in high-discretion disciplines and used high-discretion assignments knows that students achieve in many different ways, even if those ways do not always translate into the one metric of success we are allowed to give: a high grade. I once had a student who wrote about the philosophy of love by analyzing The Princess Bride, who didn’t “engage with the literature” about the philosophy of love in a way that used sufficient citations. But the student paid careful attention to details of scenes in the movie, and said creative, albeit not particularly philosophically insightful, things about those scenes. The student did not get a high grade but was doing their own thinking. In fact, the student was thinking about things creatively in a way we can only hope students will do today, in the age of AI.
Instructors in high-discretion should not welcome invitations to increasingly remove discretion from their assignments, their grading standards, and their curriculum in the interest of teaching at scale. Doing so would play right into the tech industry’s false promises that they are in a unique position to replace us. Any machine-generated assessment of gymnastic routines will value the same features of a routine. Any machine-generated essay assignment will choose the same set of topics to assign. Any machine-generated assessment of essays will value the same features of an essay. The dimensions on which one can succeed in high-discretion disciplines, regardless of a grade, is too many to give over to standardization.
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MEET THE AUTHOR
Barry Lam is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. He is the host and producer of the Hi-Phi Nation podcast for Slate, a show about the moral and philosophical issues implicated in science, law, and everyday life, and author of Fewer Rules, Better People: The Case for Discretion, part of the Norton Shorts series.
Image Credit: Melissa Surprise, Surprise Photography.