New York Magazine recently published an article titled, “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College” on how artificial intelligence (AI) has “unraveled the entire academic project.” There was little that was surprising about students being willing to cheat, although the loss of integrity is certainly sad and part of the general decay in social trust. What was striking, however, was the extent to which universities—and instructors—seem to have given up. Indeed, the crisis we face in education has less to do with students than it does with the so-called adults in the room who refuse to enforce basic standards.
For instance, when faced with unprecedented AI use in writing-intensive classes, the music department at the University of Iowa told professors “to grade based on what the essay would’ve gotten if it were a ‘true attempt at a paper.’” In other words, if an essay about, say, Mozart written by ChatGPT was accurate and answered the prompt well, the professor would have to give it an A. Rather than getting students to do their own work and learn how to write and think the hard way, the policy actually pushes students toward AI.
The article interviews a former graduate student, Sam Williams, who’d been teaching in the music department:
The ‘true attempt at a paper’ policy ruined Williams’s grading scale. If he gave a solid paper that was obviously written with AI a B, what should he give a paper written by someone who actually wrote their own paper but submitted, in his words, ‘a barely literate essay’? The confusion was enough to sour Williams on education as a whole. By the end of the semester, he was so disillusioned that he decided to drop out of graduate school altogether. ‘We’re in a new generation, a new time, and I just don’t think that’s what I want to do,’ he said.
A professor at Cal State Chico shared a similar sentiment: “Every time I talk to a colleague about this, the same thing comes up: retirement. When can I retire? When can I get out of this? That’s what we’re all thinking now.”
And yet, it’s not clear why they can’t stick with tried-and-true methods: namely, weighing assessments more than homework, and administering handwritten assessments in class, as was the norm as recently as two decades ago.
New York Magazine implies that this is impossible: “Teachers have tried AI-proofing assignments, returning to Blue Books or switching to oral exams.” There’s no explanation as to why this does not work. The author only mentions a professor at Santa Clara University who avoided assignments besides one “low-stakes reflection”…for which many of his students proceeded to use AI. But why couldn’t he just have them handwrite the reflections? Yes, students’ handwriting has gotten worse than it was due to the ubiquity of word processing in education, but that only implies that professors could kill two birds with one stone by forcing students to write their essays in blue books.
What’s missing in education—in colleges as well as schools—is not the ability to assess students effectively without technology. Rather, what’s missing in education is the willpower to make difficult decisions that might ruffle some feathers and cause short-term frustration, despite the long-term gain they would almost certainly entail.
While many of our legacy institutions are too cowardly to do this, the answer is obvious: bring back blue books. And perhaps build new institutions in which blue books are the norm, not the exception.