Nine Suspiciously Fluent Blog Posts
French 3, 28 students, 150-word blog post titled "Une tradition de ma famille," drafted at home and revised in class. In the first batch, nine submissions are suspiciously fluent: "il va sans dire que," "force est de constater," passé simple, flawless agreement - yet the same students' timed in-class writing last week was Intermediate Low with frequent errors. One submission contains a sentence that does not match the prompt, and two students admit they used "a friend." The department has no AI policy; your administrator says, "Just grade what's in front of you." The unit summative is in nine days.
1. How do you determine what happened and respond without making accusations you cannot support?
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Do not rely on detection software, and do not open with an accusation. Triangulate evidence: compare the submissions to baseline in-class writing, check for register and idiom mismatches (passé simple in a personal blog, advanced fixed phrases, zero errors, prompt drift), then hold a brief one-to-one conference. Ask the student to read two sentences aloud and explain what they meant, then to write one new sentence using the same structure without support. A student who wrote the text can do this; a student who pasted it usually cannot.
Frame the conversation around learning: "Help me understand which resources you used, because I need to know what you can do independently." If the student acknowledges translation, respond neutrally and apply a consistent redo policy.
Document the evidence and the conversation. Avoid public shaming and avoid assigning a zero based only on style. Your administrator's advice to "just grade it" is not adequate because the score would misrepresent proficiency and corrupt your data for the summative. Bring one example to the administrator with a proposed process, not a complaint.
2. Redesign the task so the assessment measures the student's own language and process. What do you change?
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Move the evidence of proficiency in-class and make the process visible. Keep the same prompt and rubric, but restructure as a process portfolio: day 1, in-class planning and a handwritten draft; day 2, teacher feedback focused on two features; day 3, in-class revision and a short oral defense in which the student explains one sentence and one vocabulary choice. Add a "language ownership" criterion tied to the oral explanation, not to error-free prose.
If your school permits AI, allow it only with a disclosure log: what was used, what was changed, and why. That turns a hidden practice into a metacognitive task. But the score for proficiency must come from supervised writing and the oral defense, because a polished product does not show what the learner can do.
Also revise the prompt so it invites personal, concrete content students can write about with Intermediate Low language: one tradition, who participates, one detail, and one comparison to a friend's family. Grand abstract phrasing is exactly what translation tools produce and what novices cannot sustain.
3. What do you do about the nine submissions now, and what policy do you recommend to the department?
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For the nine, use a tiered response rather than a blanket penalty. Where a conference shows the student cannot explain the text, offer a supervised redo for full credit with the same rubric; where the student admits assistance and completes the redo, record the new score. Where evidence is ambiguous, require the oral defense and score the defended portion. Notify families of the redo, not of an accusation, and apply the rule to all students so it is not selective enforcement.
For the department, propose a short policy with three parts: permitted uses of translation tools with disclosure; a requirement that summative proficiency scores include supervised evidence; and a process for suspected misuse that begins with a conference and a redo. This protects teachers, gives students clear expectations, and keeps your proficiency data honest.
Do this before the unit summative in nine days, because the same conditions will otherwise produce the same problem and you will have no defensible record.