When you grade only a finished product, you cannot see how it was made, and a polished product is the easiest thing to generate. Shift some weight onto the process. Collect proposals, annotated sources, outlines, drafts, and short reflections on the choices a student made and why.

Asking students to show their reasoning, explain a decision, or reflect on what changed between drafts does two things. It surfaces genuine engagement, which is hard to fake convincingly across stages, and it teaches the metacognition that improves learning. The point is not to add busywork but to assess the thinking you care about, which lives in the process as much as the product.