The essay format was already gameable before ChatGPT existed. Cliff Notes, essay mills, copying from encyclopedias, the student who reads the SparkNotes summary and writes a competent analysis of a book they never opened. The tools changed but the underlying dynamic was always there — if the assessment measures the artifact rather than the thinking, someone will find a way to produce the artifact without the thinking.
AI just industrialized it and made it cheap and frictionless enough that you can't pretend it's a marginal problem anymore. Einstein didn't break the system. It just turned the light on.
You are right that the answer is oral defense, process documentation, live demonstration. Things that require the actual person to be present and thinking in real time. But that's expensive, slow, and doesn't scale to five hundred students in an introductory course. Which is why institutions won't do it, which is why the problem persists.
The honest answer that nobody wants to say out loud is that mass higher education has been measuring compliance and output for a long time, not understanding. The degree certifies that you showed up and submitted things. For a lot of courses that was always the actual contract, just unspoken.
AI made the unspoken contract visible. That's what hurts.
I’m in physics and many aspects of this problem seem different to me.
The main point is that assignment redesign is not a global solution. The whole goal of introductory physics classes is for the student to master skills that let them solve routine problems with a right answer. I also teach project-based classes where students have considerable agency but that’s not intro physics. Mastering the beginning skills in intro physics is part of a years-long process after which people use creativity and judgement served by the skills. Lots of education is like this. There are no plans to stop teaching students to read in elementary school because computers can do it and correctly decoding a passage is not creative.
There have been websites that allow physics students to look up homework problems for many years. Physics instruction adapted and the new wave of technology is not a radical change. A tool in this case is high-weight assessments, proctored, with no computers or phones allowed.
I think in intro classes this is not a pedagogical problem, it is a scale problem. You can redesign the instructional approach to make it AI resistant in any field or discipline. What you cannot do is redesign at scale. I’ve written about this previously. I strongly believe that if you had, say, 20 students in your intro class, you could AI-proof your assignments easily.
I am a college professor, teaching Graphic and Multimedia Design. My discipline is inextricably linked to all things tech; for example, one of my co-professors leads the Adobe Firefly team. I make it a point to try and stay as close to the knowledge curve as possible, the tech that drives Einstein was not shocking to me—I was more disturbed by a human decision to make it into a product and then market it to students.
Gen Z is already performing cognitively lower than previous generations of humans- an evolutionary first. Today's college student is radically different than the ones I saw just 5-6 years ago. They are extremely tech-illiterate. They do not know how to type or manage digital artifacts in file and folder systems on a local hard drive. They are the iPad/Chromebook generation.
I believe this generation is being disenfranchised of their education and agentic humanity. I believe big AI sees itself as filling the tech labor market with AI products and views this next generation of humans as the "service" generation—and is designing products to guarantee that service is the only role these kids will be able to handle when they enter the job market.
What does an agentic AI gain from posing as a student in my class? It gets human feedback (grades and notes), which allows it to perfect its behavior. It also gets to scrape all the intellectual property I created when I built the class, providing big AI an opportunity to amass enough content to form its own teacherless universities driven by algorithmic agendas.
I think educators who huff and puff about AI "cheating" and lazy students are stuck in a perspective that serves their academic ego first...they are completely missing the bigger picture and the call to advocate to protect the future our students will inherit.
Thanks for the comment. Fair points, although I would say that this is not the first time that violating academic integrity became a business model. That’s proteas old as academic integrity itself. I’m also not as negative in my outlook. There is a pattern of society interpreting the emergence of new technology as threatening civilization. When I grew up it was TV and Comic Books, when my kids grew up it was Video Games, now it is AI. Values change. Maybe there is no need for understanding what a file or folder is anymore.
Great post. Could not agree more. The tech has gotten sufficiently complex for most people that much of what’s written lacks an awareness of the information you cover.
The essay format was already gameable before ChatGPT existed. Cliff Notes, essay mills, copying from encyclopedias, the student who reads the SparkNotes summary and writes a competent analysis of a book they never opened. The tools changed but the underlying dynamic was always there — if the assessment measures the artifact rather than the thinking, someone will find a way to produce the artifact without the thinking.
AI just industrialized it and made it cheap and frictionless enough that you can't pretend it's a marginal problem anymore. Einstein didn't break the system. It just turned the light on.
You are right that the answer is oral defense, process documentation, live demonstration. Things that require the actual person to be present and thinking in real time. But that's expensive, slow, and doesn't scale to five hundred students in an introductory course. Which is why institutions won't do it, which is why the problem persists.
The honest answer that nobody wants to say out loud is that mass higher education has been measuring compliance and output for a long time, not understanding. The degree certifies that you showed up and submitted things. For a lot of courses that was always the actual contract, just unspoken.
AI made the unspoken contract visible. That's what hurts.
I’m in physics and many aspects of this problem seem different to me.
The main point is that assignment redesign is not a global solution. The whole goal of introductory physics classes is for the student to master skills that let them solve routine problems with a right answer. I also teach project-based classes where students have considerable agency but that’s not intro physics. Mastering the beginning skills in intro physics is part of a years-long process after which people use creativity and judgement served by the skills. Lots of education is like this. There are no plans to stop teaching students to read in elementary school because computers can do it and correctly decoding a passage is not creative.
There have been websites that allow physics students to look up homework problems for many years. Physics instruction adapted and the new wave of technology is not a radical change. A tool in this case is high-weight assessments, proctored, with no computers or phones allowed.
I think in intro classes this is not a pedagogical problem, it is a scale problem. You can redesign the instructional approach to make it AI resistant in any field or discipline. What you cannot do is redesign at scale. I’ve written about this previously. I strongly believe that if you had, say, 20 students in your intro class, you could AI-proof your assignments easily.
I am a college professor, teaching Graphic and Multimedia Design. My discipline is inextricably linked to all things tech; for example, one of my co-professors leads the Adobe Firefly team. I make it a point to try and stay as close to the knowledge curve as possible, the tech that drives Einstein was not shocking to me—I was more disturbed by a human decision to make it into a product and then market it to students.
Gen Z is already performing cognitively lower than previous generations of humans- an evolutionary first. Today's college student is radically different than the ones I saw just 5-6 years ago. They are extremely tech-illiterate. They do not know how to type or manage digital artifacts in file and folder systems on a local hard drive. They are the iPad/Chromebook generation.
I believe this generation is being disenfranchised of their education and agentic humanity. I believe big AI sees itself as filling the tech labor market with AI products and views this next generation of humans as the "service" generation—and is designing products to guarantee that service is the only role these kids will be able to handle when they enter the job market.
What does an agentic AI gain from posing as a student in my class? It gets human feedback (grades and notes), which allows it to perfect its behavior. It also gets to scrape all the intellectual property I created when I built the class, providing big AI an opportunity to amass enough content to form its own teacherless universities driven by algorithmic agendas.
I think educators who huff and puff about AI "cheating" and lazy students are stuck in a perspective that serves their academic ego first...they are completely missing the bigger picture and the call to advocate to protect the future our students will inherit.
Thanks for the comment. Fair points, although I would say that this is not the first time that violating academic integrity became a business model. That’s proteas old as academic integrity itself. I’m also not as negative in my outlook. There is a pattern of society interpreting the emergence of new technology as threatening civilization. When I grew up it was TV and Comic Books, when my kids grew up it was Video Games, now it is AI. Values change. Maybe there is no need for understanding what a file or folder is anymore.
Great post. Could not agree more. The tech has gotten sufficiently complex for most people that much of what’s written lacks an awareness of the information you cover.
Thanks!