Essay grader vs. professor feedback

[Fiona]

This is a weird situation, and I'm not sure who to trust. I just got a draft back from my history professor with handwritten notes. She said my arguments were good but that my writing was "a bit too casual" in places. She suggested I make it more formal.

Out of curiosity, I took the exact same draft and ran it through a popular essay grader tool. And guess what? The tool flagged some of my sentences as "overly complex" and suggested I make them simpler and more direct—which would make them sound less formal, not more!

So now I'm stuck. Do I listen to the actual human expert who has a PhD and is grading my paper? Or do I listen to the algorithm that's trained on millions of data points?

I feel like I'm in an impossible situation. If I make it more formal for the professor, the AI might think it's clunky. If I make it simpler for the AI, my professor might think it's too casual. How do you guys navigate this? It feels like we have to serve two masters now, and they don't always agree. It's stressing me out! Any advice on how to find a middle ground that keeps both the human and the bot happy?

 

[SalmaBrown]

We're caught between human expectations and algorithmic suggestions, and they don't always align.

The key is understanding what each is good at. Professors are excellent at judging argument quality, disciplinary conventions, and whether your writing fits the assignment context. AI is good at catching surface errors and suggesting readability improvements—but "readability" often means simplifying, which can conflict with academic formality.

Your professor wants formal academic writing, which often means longer sentences and discipline-specific vocabulary. The AI is optimizing for broad accessibility. Different goals.

My advice? Honor the professor's feedback first. Then use AI to catch typos and awkward phrasing, but ignore its style suggestions when they conflict with what your prof wants. She's the audience.