Updates to the Draft Coach Based on Student Feedback
Since the launch of the CoursePlus Draft Coach in October 2024, faculty and students across a wide range of classes have used the tool to help improve long-form student written work.
As the primary target for the CoursePlus Draft Coach is students, getting student feedback on the value of the tool was of great importance. Students talked, and the CoursePlus team listened.
The following changes were made based on student feedback:
- You can now submit a file every four hours, down from every 24-hours.
- Additional fields were added to the tool to provide greater specificity of the feedback:
- Type of writing: research paper, thesis, project proposal, OpEd, etc.
- Audience for the writing: faculty, policy makers, general public, review committee, etc.
- The tool now uses the GPT-5 model from OpenAI. This more advanced model provides a number of benefits:
- Less sycophancy, more direct and actionable feedback
- Better understanding of complex scientific and medical topics
- More “reasoning” effort by the model before generating a response
Finally, the Draft Coach now sends feedback via email within five minutes of submitting your file, down from the previous averages of 7-8 minutes. Faster feedback is always a good thing!
We fully plan to incorporate additional feedback into the CoursePlus Draft Coach as we receive it from students.
As always, if you have questions about these changes, please reach out to the CTL Help team, and we will be happy to answer any questions you might have.