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Using In-Class Writing to Promote and Assess Learning

With the proliferation of AI tools, many faculty and instructors have turned to in-class writing to assess student learning. As with any other assessment technique, we will want to consider the affordances and limitations of this approach, while also thinking through strategies that will provide students with opportunities to practice and demonstrate their learning. This resource aims to provide ideas and considerations for approaching in-class writing in the AI landscape. The CCTL provides further guidance on designing AI-aware assignments here.

When we ask students to free-write initial thoughts for an essay assignment, write out reflections as a springboard for discussion, jot annotations on a text, and the like, the primary purpose is to promote learning: to grapple with new ideas and connect to prior knowledge, formulate thoughts, and deepen understanding. These activities are usually not part of a graded, summative evaluation. This type of writing is typically lower-stakes and expected to be less polished than out-of-class written assignments. Activities that serve this purpose include minute papers, free-writing, and short responses to questions posed in class.

Using in-class writing to assess learning invites students to demonstrate their understanding of content and their facility with skills such as analysis, argumentation, and interpretation of concepts, texts, data, and the like. Our standards for assessed writing tend to be higher, as will the stakes for student performance. We might expect something more refined and coherent than students would produce on a brainstorming activity, though still less so than what they could produce on their own outside of class with more time. Of course, well-designed writing assignments also serve a learning purpose, since students may deepen their understanding as a result of preparing for and completing in-class written assessments.

In-class writing typically cannot take the place of writing that involves taking time to build and revise an argument, reference primary or secondary sources, or go through significant re-writing—in other words, the kind of writing we hope students do when we assign final papers (though see below for ideas on this). Thus, it is important to either refine the goals or expectations for a given assignment to align with what students can produce in a shorter window of time and without word processing software; or, as described below, consider how in-class writing can be extended over multiple class sessions, perhaps with the use of in-class laptops.

Today’s students may have less experience writing by hand, especially at length, and that lack of physical stamina may be reflected in the legibility of their written work. Consider requiring students to write in blue or black ink to make reading handwritten work easier. If you want students to write at length in class but want to avoid reading handwritten essays, consider allowing students to write on laptops, perhaps using the Respondus Lockdown browser (see more below). Finally, consider how you will work with students who have disability accommodations which may require the use of technology to read or write or whose accommodations may require extra time to complete assessments.

A typical essay or research paper asks students to demonstrate multiple capabilities at once. These may include posing a question; constructing a problem; generating a thesis; conducting a literature review and engaging with scholarly debates; gathering or analyzing data; interpreting a text or results; arguing from evidence; style, grammar, mechanics; and so on. Some of these may have a greater priority in the learning goals of a class than others, and we can design an in-class assessment to focus on those and jettison the others. For example, in-class close reading exercises allow students to practice and demonstrate their textual interpretation skills. This approach allows us to home in on the central skills of a class, helping students to understand just where they should focus their energies and perhaps providing more practice to boot.

A rubric can help clarify—both for yourself and your students—just what the expectations are for an in-class essay. Particularly if you are transitioning from take-home to in-class essays, identifying the elements of a successful in-class essay and what excellent/good/poor performance on each of those looks like can help align students’ preparation to the learning task at hand. We may also refine over time just what we expect for an in-class piece of writing as we learn what students can/cannot achieve in those conditions, and a rubric helps us to reflect on and track our changing expectations over time.

In-class writing might serve as a complementary assessment “twin” to a take-home essay, research paper, or other project that is vulnerable to AI but is essential to the learning goals of a course. As a response to AI vulnerabilities, assessment twinning provides two different assessments to students that evaluate the same, or similar, learning goals. This allows the instructor to triangulate evidence across pedagogically valuable student work to better assess the learning aimed at in a course (Roe et al., 2026). Being transparent with students about this design may also encourage them to be discerning about whether or how to use AI, since they will know they will need to demonstrate their learning in at least one AI-resistant format.

While one-off in-class writing activities can assess some aspects of student learning, they don’t provide the opportunity to develop the skills and habits longer-term writing helps to build, such as extended thinking, revision, responding to feedback, and the like. To achieve this, use structured in-class writing that builds upon work that students do outside of class. For example, students can make marginal notes and highlights on peer-reviewed journal articles or conduct other research as homework; then, in a series of short, in-class writing assignments, they do the work that goes into developing a longer piece of writing (constructing a problem, articulating a thesis, creating an outline, etc.). This idea comes from “A Way to Save the Essay” by Lily Abadal. Another variation comes from Melih Levi, Assistant Instructional Professor in Fundamentals: Issues and Texts, who uses an assignment called “The Loop” to teach students skills in close reading. “The Loop” involves three (or more) rounds of in-class writing (approximately 20 minutes each) based on a prompt that is customized for each student, with each round building on the previous. Professor Levi discussed the structure of this assignment and how he prepares students to do the in-class writing during the CCTL’s “Teaching Without AI” faculty panel; you can view that recording here.

Another model might include disaggregating the components or tasks involved in crafting an essay and making those pieces in-class activities. For example, students can conduct the research into a problem outside of class and come prepared to develop their thesis or formulate responses to counterarguments or opposing theoretical perspectives in class after reading outside of class. Similarly, students can use in-class time to write explanations of quantitative data or to describe how they would approach investigating a research problem.

Offering opportunities for in-class revision can help students understand the role of revision and drafting in general, and it can help us to see the progression and development of students’ work over time. Students often need guidance for revision that helps them focus on the growth and development of their ideas rather than focusing on “editing.” Consider conducting in-class writing workshops where students revise previous work or where students engage in peer review, with the expectation that students will address their peers’ feedback when they revise and resubmit their in-class writing. For additional guidance on developing peer-review workshops, consult this resource from the Writing Across the Curriculum Clearinghouse.

If we frame asynchronous written homework as practice for the kind of writing students will do in class, students can view the writing they are asked to do outside of class as an opportunity to prepare for the graded in-class assessment. This requires aligning the homework writing to the kind of writing students will do in class, as well as providing feedback (from a mix of the instructor, a TA, and peers) on the homework aimed at helping students to improve their eventual performance on the graded writing. Here, we might consider grading the homework for completion or for a smaller portion of the overall course grade to lower the stakes and frame the assignments as practice.

This strategy provides a window into students’ understanding and thought processes during lecture or discussion, can help to decrease the cognitive load on individual students, and can help mitigate differences in prior knowledge among students. Collaborative note taking can take two broad forms: in “pause and partner” methods, students engage in individual notetaking and then compare notes in pairs or small groups, helping each other to flesh out ideas, correct misconceptions, and revise their notes. In “co-created” models, students work together (all students, or more often a rotating set of students) in a shared document to produce a set of notes to share with the entire class. The collaborative notes can be created in an online version, created and managed by the instructor, or handwritten form; in either case, students are typically expected to revise and “clean up” the notes prior to sharing it with the rest of the class. When Harbin (2020) used collaborative notes in her intro-level American government courses, students said that they found the resource helpful for preparing for exams, double-checking their own notes, and staying engaged with discussion.

An alternative to moving student writing to class time is to create opportunities in which students can demonstrate intellectual responsibility for their ideas and the work they have done. The idea here is not to interrogate students to see whether they used AI, but rather to engage in an intellectual discussion to understand a student’s thinking—and perhaps to help the student further develop their understanding as well—while also assessing their understanding. This idea can extend to other forms of asynchronous writing. For example, a scaffolded writing assignment with periodic check-ins and feedback from the instructor, TA, and/or peers presents opportunities for students to demonstrate responsibility for their ideas and to track their thinking over time. We can also motivate student thinking by connecting low-stakes reading responses—whether posted to Canvas or written as part of a commonplace book—to in-class discussion by having students elaborate on their written reflections or pose the questions they raised to the class.

One concern with in-class essays is that students are asked to formulate an immediate response after freshly encountering the prompt. Providing options in advance gives students the opportunity to prepare for in-class writing by allowing them to review notes, read assigned material, formulate ideas, and prepare for the task of writing in-class. Providing several prompts in advance and then asking students to write on, say, one or two of those in class encourages students to do more preparatory work that promotes learning.

An open-book exam may help students write better in-class essays, though it runs the risk of students spending too much time scanning a text and not focusing on writing. An alternative is to make an exam “open-article” or to provide students the text or data that is relevant for the prompt in the exam (perhaps in advance to allow students to annotate the material before the exam). Another option is to allow students to bring, say, one or two pages of notes or outlines they have written in class.

This tool, provided by ATS, limits the access students have to apps and webpages when they are writing or taking exams by “locking down” their browser or word processing software. This enables students to produce more writing than they can by hand and to revise their work more easily than in a handwritten bluebook style exam. It also addresses the challenge of reading students’ handwritten work. ATS provides guidance for both instructors and students on how to use the tool. Plan an ungraded in-class activity with the tool before using it for a graded assessment to allow students to familiarize themselves with it and to test for any technical difficulties.

Abadal, Lily. “A Way to Save the Essay.” Inside Higher Ed, November 7, 2025. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/career-advice/teaching/2025/11/07/way-save-essay-opinion.

Hammerton, Matthew, and Jacqueline Ho. “How to Save the Take-Home Essay With Oral Assessments.” Inside Higher Ed, June 8, 2026. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/career-advice/teaching/2026/06/08/saving-take-home-essay-oral-assessments-opinion.

Harbin, M. Brielle. “Collaborative Note-Taking: A Tool for Creating a More Inclusive College Classroom.” College Teaching 68, no. 4 (2020): 214–20.

Johnson, Sarah. “Scaffolding the Writing Process: An Approach to Assignment Design in the SOSC Core.” Chicago Center for Teaching and Learning: Teaching Matters. Accessed August 3, 2026. https://teaching.uchicago.edu/resources/scaffolding-writing-process-approach-assignment-design-sosc-core.

Roe, Jasper, Mike Perkins, and Louie Giray. “Assessment Twins: An Approach for Strengthening Assessment Validity in the Age of Generative AI.” Journal of Applied Learning and Teaching 9, no. 2 (2026): e3708–e3708. https://doi.org/10.37074/jalt.2026.9.2.3.

The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “In-Class Writing Exercises.” The Writing Center, n.d. Accessed August 3, 2026. https://writingcenter.unc.edu/faculty-resources/tips-on-teaching-writing/in-class-writing-exercises/.

WAC Clearinghouse. “Faculty Tip Sheets.” WAC, n.d. Accessed August 3, 2026. https://wacclearinghouse.org/repository/teaching/tips/.