Rewrite the Rules: Fixing the Assignment, Not Just the Attitude

By Carter F. Smith | carterfsmith.com

Let me say it plain: I don’t want to spend my career playing grammar cop to an army of language models. I’d rather fix the job than police the tools. That’s what Rewrite the Rules is about.

If you read my last post (Beyond Detection), you know I’m not here to scold students for using AI. I’m here to understand what its use says about what we’ve built. Because frankly, some of our assignments are just begging for automation.

That’s not a dig. It’s a pattern I’ve seen—over and over again, in cases and classrooms alike. If a task is boring, predictable, easily gamed, and high-stakes with low feedback? It will be exploited. Not by the worst students, but often by the most efficient ones.

So I stopped asking “How do I catch them?” and started asking “Why does this prompt need to exist in the first place?”

That shift—right there—is what Rewrite the Rules walks through.

We talk about redesigning assignments not as an act of defense, but of intention. We focus on how to make writing harder to fake and easier to own. And I don’t mean “harder” like more pages or tighter deadlines. I mean assignments that push students to reflect, to integrate, to say something no machine could say.

We tackle feedback, rubrics, and grading structures that emphasize process over product. Because when students know you’re evaluating their thinking, not just their typing, they approach the work differently.

You can’t expect a reflection paper if you never built in a moment for them to reflect. You can’t expect transparency about AI if they think it’ll get them a zero.

We built a toolkit—rubrics, process trackers, disclosure language. All freely available [here]. Faculty left with revised prompts and (I hope) a little less anxiety and a little more curiosity.

Because this isn’t a war on AI. It’s a call to build better structures, together.

And if that sounds too soft? I’ll remind you: when we redesigned field interview forms in the CID, it wasn’t because we liked paper cuts. It was because the old ones weren’t getting us what we needed.

Same principle. Better design = better outcomes. And sometimes fewer lies.

So next time you’re grading a suspiciously perfect paper, take a breath. Ask what part of the assignment invited the shortcut. Then go fix that.

—Carter

carterfsmith.com