Where AI and Education are Unaligned 🎓🦅
Who is doing the work?
AI seems like a silver bullet for all manner of issues in education. So why is student use of AI to complete assignments so often akin to shooting themselves in the foot? But first the news…
COLLEGE NEWS
The college cull continues: Did you know that, since 2013, over 15 percent of the 4,724 degree-granting colleges or universities have shut their doors? The apparent reason has little to do with societal ambivalence about higher ed. Instead, it’s because good leadership is hard to find.
Honor is dead, at least in New Jersey: Rampant academic dishonesty has claimed yet another victim: Princeton University’s Honor Code. University faculty voted overwhelmingly this spring to end the 133-year-old tradition of unproctored examinations.
Supplemental essay surrender: What do WashU, UGA, and Tulane all have in common? Each of them have recently dropped supplemental essays from their admissions requirements. Don’t worry—that Common App essay you spend all summer procrastinating still counts!
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BIG IDEA
I just got back from the fantastic IECA National Conference in Baltimore and am still processing all of the compelling conversations about college admissions. However, one thread that emerged as a cause more for concern than celebration was the way advances in AI are impacting every element of higher education. But even if next year’s hottest majors will all be tech-related, as one presentation suggested, college counselors don’t seem ready to abandon everything training and experience have taught them to embrace this apparent new world order. We should be just as dubious as they are.
A number of fascinating threads related to the impact of AI and technology in education are intertwining in a way that reveals a disturbing pattern:
As an educator myself, I meet students every day who—despite top grades in honors classes—lack fundamental reading, writing, and math skills. And I understand most of the complex reasons why this happens even when parents, educators, and administrators are committed to the highest academic ideals. Unfortunately, the current obsession with AI may be appropriate on the operational side of any educational enterprise but it’s killing the core product: learning.
Simply put, learning is a reward for a certain amount of exertion and effort, the interplay between the transmission of information and hard-earned understanding. Being taught is no guarantee of learning, nor is a degree necessarily proof of understanding. Between these academic inputs and outputs lie the student, who must be an active participant in the learning process in order to yield its true benefits. Today’s AI models allow students to bridge that gap effortlessly, which is to say that AI is happy to do the hard work for a student.
Whoever does the work does the learning.
This universal and ineluctable fact underlies all human achievement. When you work to master something new, your reward is another step towards mastery. If someone else does that work, they derive the inherent benefits. Back in my day, students often skipped assigned reading and instead consulted the Cliff’s Notes or similar cheat guides to write their book reports. Even when those students earned great grades, they missed out on any material improvement in reading skill, vocabulary acquisition, or understanding that the assignment was intended to facilitate.
Now imagine how many opportunities today’s students have to sidestep the work and allow the latest tech tool to complete even the most complex assignments.
Education is upside down across all grade levels because of AI allows lazy learners to delegate their work--and thus their learning--to a bot. The implications of this reality are rippling not just through academia but society as a whole. None of us know where this Fourth Industrial Revolution will take us or even what majors will position next year’s graduates for greater success. But we know that whoever does the work does the learning, so make sure your students are taking on the tough assignments themselves. AI may work as a teaching tool but it cannot learn for you, and the learning is what prepares you for an uncertain future.
(If you’re interested in more on this topic, I recommend Freddie deBoer’s LLMs and the Library Card Fallacy and my own The Ones Who Love the Work.)
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Great article, gets right to the core issues and really informs the reader what the higher ed pros are thinking, whether they're professors, staff, or consultants.