Our Position: Students should not be allowed to use Grammarly for assignments.

Technology versus pen and paper will always be a controversial debate—saving the trees by using less paper or saving education by verifying academic integrity. Both arguments have reason, but technology usually wins, as evidenced by Canvas, Google Docs, and every other app now instilled into our education system. One thing that most students mindlessly rely on and others rarely acknowledge in academic integrity is Grammarly, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) writing assistant to better your written communication.
Separated by sections of correctness, clarity, engagement, and delivery, Grammarly covers all bases. It can completely rewrite sentences, change your tone, or correct spelling. In a time where literacy rates are declining, it’s time to place blame outside of the disaster that was COVID-19 and take a look at what arose during the pandemic. According to Electro IQ, Grammarly’s daily active users grew 30 million just in 2020.
Grammarly isn’t a tool of assistance but a detriment to students’ learning. Upcoming generations are going to be grown adults unable to use proper grammar rules all because a computer can tell them what’s right and wrong. We can’t express ourselves properly and coherently. This means less motivational speakers, and leaders in general, and no idea will be valued if it isn’t framed and communicated properly. It fails to teach and instead fixes grammatical errors without enforcing a lesson. On pen and paper, you see red marks and a grade decrease that pushes students to then pursue the learning elsewhere and ultimately remember their mistake. In world language classes, we don’t see typed writing assessments with the “assistance” of Google Translate, so why in our primary language should we accept such help? Spelling, communication, coherence, and tone are all a part of writing literacy that should be authentic in homework, projects, and writing in its entirety.
Furthermore, just like any AI, Grammarly takes away a human voice. Grammarly morphs original writing to look familiar to the system’s generated data. In Google Docs, writing this editorial, Grammarly is telling me to buy “suggestions” to improve my clarity. Yet a human voice is clear in this writing. Changing this delivery to a suggestion of accumulated data can’t improve that.
In all honesty, many users don’t even like Grammarly. Most people simply have and use it out of habit, relying on it subconsciously. Additionally, when Grammarly is wrong—believe it or not the AI installed in Grammarly is too often wrong—the user either puts trust in the computer or has to restart the suggestion from scratch. This is annoying and should be the breaking point for most users. And yet, this is never the breaking point to make anyone ever uninstall Grammarly.
As a final question, we ask what is the line between sequenced, reorganized, and clarified sentences from Grammarly and complete ChatGPT essays?

Staff Vote: 10-13