“We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.” That’s what the Soviet Union said in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Soviet Union was shaking.
Today’s American higher education is facing a similar crisis of confidence.
Most people in academia seem to ignore the signs of an impending collapse and keep moving forward as if the status quo is inevitable. Continuous increase in tuition fees, expansion of administrative bureaucracy, relentless fundraising activities, and a focus on buzzwords such as “efficiency” dominates the academic ecosystem. The efficiency of today’s academic overview seems to be consistent with how to teach most students (i.e., maximize income) with minimal overhead (i.e., by using minimal or minimum salaries of faculty). This endless power of efficiency is the biggest crisis in higher education today.
For at least the last two academic cycles, it has been recognized that artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to play an important role in higher education in the United States. At first, the challenge was how to detect if a student was using AI to complete his homework. Once Chatgpt is released for public consumption, it is clear that the software can do quite a bit of work on behalf of enterprising students. Just insert your prompt and enter some parameters and the chatbot returns a pretty persuasive writing. The only problem becomes 1) how students need to change the output of chatbots before submitting, and 2) how teachers can discover such human intervention measures. The teacher’s debate focused on how to determine the work of AI generation and the appropriate response. Are we responsible for stealing? Using a chatbot seems to be a form of academic dishonesty, but who does the students copy? Like many teachers, I saw some clear examples of AI in student paper submissions. Thankfully, since I used a specific column in the classroom, I was able to ignore whether the students were acting alone and rate the papers based on how much they met each expectation. The content generated by AI tends to include a lot of fuzz, often lacks precise and direct quotes, and often reflects hesitation to play a strong stance, thus making detection easier to detect and, given the severe grade implications, use of my students has been reduced.
If the complications of work around Ai-Enhathated or AI sources represent challenges to the integrity of the education system, we can be assured that we will be able to stick to and overcome indefinitely. But we can’t. The most serious problem threatening to disrupt the system is not the discovery of AI challenges in student work, but the fact that universities are encouraging AI’s wholesale embrace.
Universities across the United States, especially those claiming to be cutting-edge or innovative, claim that AI is the future and we must teach students how to master AI in order to prepare for their careers. Urge our teachers to leverage AI in the classroom accordingly. You might ask what this looks like? In a way, this means asking teachers to consider how AI is used to create assignments and lesson plans, how to help research, and how to help students work.
Using AI as a teaching tool seems harmless enough – all, if an instructor uses AI to ask questions for tests, prompting papers or slides for students to consume, then this is probably based on the material provided in the course, and AI is based on AI, using it as its source. That should be true.
Using AI to help research seems innocent, too. Previously, I had to use keywords to search databases and directories and then read a lot of material. Taking notes, organizing my thoughts and making arguments is an inherently time-consuming and inefficient process. I might read hundreds of pages of material and realize that the direction I took was futile and asked me to start over. AI promises to expand my search and provide summary, and I can handle it more efficiently when looking to find a direction for the direction of the scholarship. Now, thanks to AI, I can use my time more wisely, so the story begins. All of this efficiency means I can do more research, or I can free up time to teach students more effectively.
So we got into the key to the problem: using AI to grade students.
Ratings represent a large amount of time allocation for most teachers in higher education. Papers may cost the longest score, but multiple choice tests and discussion posts may also require a lot of effort to evaluate them fairly. Feedback from assignments represents the backbone of education, an opportunity to guide students and challenge them to think critically. My discussion workshop scores are based on the participation section and the argumentation paper section, which can limit my course to 21 years old. I can spend time helping students and grant them scores commensurate with their performance abilities (the ability to be shown in the progress of the semester is ideal). However, once the class size is over 21 years old, my ability to rating and use feedback as a learning tool decreases.
Here we return to drive for efficiency. The university has accepted more part-time teachers, reliance on scoring assistants (usually drawn from other student teams who work for less money) and large class sizes to maximize profitability. All institutions need to keep solvents, so this is not a sin in itself. However, continuing to push the boundaries means that the actual student experience has been declining for decades. AI promises will make things worse. AI can be used to expand the number of students in the course and narrow down the paid hosts of the course. The machine can perform submissions of titles and thousands of student submissions in a very small amount of time, no matter how complex. Think of university administrators thinking about how much profit the course would be in this case.
This is a trap. What is the value of higher education if students learn how to use AI to complete tasks and teachers use AI to design student work for courses, assignments, and grades? How long does it take for people to regard the degree as a ridiculous paper? How long does it take until it drips and affects our economic and cultural output? In short, can we afford a scene where students pretend to learn, do we pretend to teach them?
