How To Grade Law Students Taking 'Paper Classes' Given Student Access to Artificial Intelligence Programs: The Experience From One Class

Abstract

This short paper presents and discusses a new approach to teaching “paper classes” in law school, given current student access to artificial intelligence programs such as ChatGPT and Lexis+AI, that was tried for a Southern Methodist University class during the fall, 2023 semester. These AI programs are now capable of producing research papers in response to carefully structured prompts that with only minor editing for style and accuracy are generally sufficient to obtain at least minimal passing grades, and these programs are improving rapidly in their capabilities. This approach was designed to address in a balanced fashion several different concerns that are raised by these AI programs, and it appeared to be successful in doing so.