Telling Students to Evaluate Does Not Make It Happen: Task Stage, Offloading Tendency, and Error Detection in...

Instructors can prescribe which part of a writing task a student may delegate to generative AI, but not how the student works. This four-arm randomised experiment separated them. At Site A, 744 undergraduates were randomised to one of four divisions of labour across four rounds of report writing-AI drafts and the student evaluates and revises; the student drafts and AI evaluates; the student drafts, AI revises, and the student adjudicates each change; no AI-with all AI withdrawn at Week 6 post-test, immediately after the final round (639 completed). A reduced three-arm replication at Site B randomised 126 students (109 completed). Both arrangements in which the student judged AI-produced text outperformed the arrangement in which AI judged student-produced text and the no-AI control (d = 0.35 to 0.36), whereas having AI evaluate was equivalent to no AI. The benefit was unevenly distributed (arm × tendency F(3, 629) = 7.25, p < 0.001), and logs showed students high in dependent tendency re-outsourcing their assigned evaluation (b = 0.072, p < 0.001). Satisfaction carried no information about error detection (r = 0.015), while self-rated quality was weakly associated with writing performance. Prescribing a division of labour governs the assignment, not the cognition.