The Constellation File

A HARVEST KERNEL WORKING SESSION

The Constellation File

Bring one assignment you already teach. In about 30 minutes you will leave holding your syllabus detector line, three pieces of evidence the assignment will collect besides the final product, and the three questions you would ask a student before any grade changes. You do the thinking. Nothing here writes it for you.

Why this exists. On September 29, 2026, Dartmouth gave its undergraduate faculty seven guidelines on AI detection. One of them says that before a finding of responsibility, the Committee on Standards will look at a constellation of information beyond the result of an AI detection tool. A detector score is one point of light. This session builds the rest of the constellation into one assignment before the paper is due, so you never have to build it after.

SEED

Name the one assignment

Pick the assignment you would least like to defend in front of a standards committee if a detector flagged it tomorrow. That is the one worth fixing first.






SPROUT

Write your detector line

Dartmouth requires faculty to tell students whether a detector may be used and whether its results could affect grades, and to talk with the student before a result touches a grade. Whether or not your campus requires it, your students are owed the same sentence before the first submission. Write it in three short parts.






GROW

Pick your three points of light

Name three pieces of evidence this assignment will collect besides the final product. Keep them small and collect them while the work is happening, not after. Small evidence collected on time beats large evidence requested after a flag.






HARVEST

Write the conversation while nobody is accused

Questions written in advance are fairer than questions written in suspicion. Write the three you would ask any student, flagged or not, so the conversation is about the work and not about the score.






Before you copy it out, one observation.

That is one assignment. Count the others on your syllabus that a detector could flag.

Doing this by hand works, and it took you about 30 minutes. Every major assignment needs its own points of light, timed to its own due dates, and next term you teach another section with a different calendar. That is the whole problem with the method, and it is a scale problem rather than a quality problem.


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When one assignment is not the problem

The Assessment Builder does this for every assignment in a course instead of one. You give it an outcome you already wrote, and it returns the assessment with its evidence checkpoints and the rubric line that grades them, in your own course language, so the constellation exists before the paper arrives.

See the Assessment Builder