Beat this game of prisoner's dilemma with a club at the accreditation level. Students can complain all they want, but if they want a diploma which certifies that they are able to perform the skills they learned, they will have to actually perform those skills.
This is way outside the scope of something that a faculty member who is, as the article says, trying to teach has any hope of implementing within a reasonable time frame. Of course the ideal is that faculty, as major stakeholders in the educational institution, should ideally be active in all levels of university governance, but I think it is important to realize how much of a prerequisite there is for an individual professor even to get their voice heard by an accrediting body, let alone to change its accrediting procedures.
That's setting aside the fact that, even if faculty really mobilized to make such changes, in the absolute best case the changes would be slow to implement, and the effects would be slow to manifest, as universities are on multi-year accreditation cycles and there would need to be at least a few reputable universities that were disaccredited before others started taking the guidance seriously. Even if I were willing to throw everything into the politics of university governance, which would make my teaching suffer immensely, I'm not willing to say that we'll just have to wait a decade to see the effects.
Take gyms, for example. You have your cheap commodity convenience gyms like Planet Fitness, where a lot of people sign up (especially at the beginning of the year) but few actually stick to it to get any real gains. But you also have pricy fitness clubs with mandatory beginner classes, where the member base tends to be smaller but very committed to it.
I feel like students that are OK with just phoning it in with AI fall into the Planet Fitness mindset. If you're serious about gains (physically or intellectually), you'll listen to the instructors and persist through uncomfortable challenges.
I see no future in education other than making homework completely ungraded, and putting 100% of the grade into airgapped exams. Sure, the pen and paper CS exam isn't reflective of a real world situation, but the universities need some way to objectively measure understanding once the pupil has been disconnected from his oracle.
I teach at a university and I just scale my homework assignments until they reach or exceed sightly the amount of work I expect a student to be able to do with AI. Before I would give them a problem set. Next semester homeworks will be more like entire projects.
Under your system, I would have been actively punished for not cheating. What's the point of developing a cure that's worse than the disease?
It's a bit similar to making a class harder because some students are getting extra help via private tutoring.
1. Absurd. The measurement should be learning not “work”. My students move rocks with a forklift… so I give them more rocks to move?
2. From the university I’m looking for intellectual leadership. Professors thinking critically about what learning means and how to discuss it with students. The potential is there, but let’s not walk like zombies unthinking into a future where the disappearance of ChatGPT 8.5 renders thousands of people unable to meet the basic requirements of their jobs. Or its appearance renders them unemployed.
I teach data science, which involves a lot of relatively unimportant glueing together of libraries. Yes, I want the students to know how to program, but the key skills are actually coming to grips with data, applying methods correctly, etc. The AI can make writing out the actual code substantially more efficient for them and I expect them to use that saved time to understand higher level skills.
Realistically I think we're just moving away from knowledge-work and efforts to resuscitate it are just varying levels of triage for a bleeding limb.
In the actual workplace with people making hundreds of thousands a year (the top echelon of what your class is trying to prepare students for) I'm not seeing output increase with AI tools so clearly effort is just decreasing for the same amount of output.
Perhaps your class is just supposed to be easier now and that's okay.
Not rhetorical, I'm genuinely curious and could see that being a real scenario.
Maybe the issue is, somewhat, the concept of graded homework in the first place. It's meant to be practice material, but is only actually useful as practice material if students put in that work. A lot of students come to resent the mountains of at-home work as the busywork that it feels like in the moment, and I feel like this whole set of emotions underpins the argument but isn't really called out for what it is all that often. Teachers understand the value of actually doing that practice, but the grading system rewards, instead, rushing through the busywork as quickly as possible. Are we not testing for the right things?
Yeah, this seems like the obvious conclusion.
To be frank, a lot of programming is busywork, boilerplate, looking up information. Now that an AI can do that for my students I expect them to spend the time made up on developing higher level skills.
What made you get into teaching?
Would the teacher then grade the massive workload with AI also? There isn't really a limit to how much output an AI can generate and the more someone demands, the less likely it is that the final result will be looked at in any depth by a human.