The direction I’m moving, and other teachers as well is to only consider in class work for assessment. Specifically pencil and paper work.

If you had asked me to predict what a high-quality education would look like post-Covid I would have said high quality videos made with great production value with rock star teachers and domain experts involved. Combined with local teachers offering a more personal tutoring like experience to clarify the videos.

If you asked me now what a high-quality education would look like in the post-AI future. I would say boarding schools that don’t allow phones, with almost all assessments being done in person with pencil and paper.

There’s no denying that technologies can make certain topics unnecessary to learn. Calculators can do basic calculus with ease these days and AI can summarize a text or write a bland essay or implement a simple intro to HTML assignment. But if the goal for education is to learn we have to limit the use of technologies that limit learning.

I suppose there’s another debate to be had about vocational learning and taking advantage of modern tools. That’s usually why I say “high-quality” education when discussing these things. For the average family AI is here to stay in education. For the schools for the elite, AI is an experiment which is slowly being kicked out.

Students often carry misconceptions about coursework. They may view an instructor as an opponent standing in the way of the grade they want. And they see “getting the right answers” as the goal of education because that’s how you secure that grade.

Pedagogy aside, this is not entirely untrue in the lower division, at least on an institutional level. It’s usually the institution propping instructors up to stand in the way. They are told “you have to meet these learning outcomes, so these assignments have to do X, Y, and Z” and turns out X, Y, and Z are bullshit, but it meets accreditation standards if the class is audited. I taught rhetoric and it had to be explicitly Aristotelian. It blew chunks, nobody liked it or really understood it, but it was what the department justified to the institution for accreditation purposes.

I hated giving grades. I wanted to see continual improvement rather than final products. With a gun to my head I wouldn’t go back.

This author is bringing up one of my biggest concerns about AI adoption, which is that it’s allowing people to come off as an expert while just skipping the learning process entirely. The learning process is where personal development happens. It’s where you become a better person. And I don’t just mean in college, I mean in all things. And professors are supposed to somehow make sure that students are going through that process, while also being told to adopt AI in the classroom.

Also, I first skimmed the headline as “It’s time to teach ChatGPT to know pain,” and…YES.

school admin (and everyone else tbh) are completely fucking clueless about how to deal with the AI problem, or worse, are actively trying to incorporate it as part of the process of research. all they’re doing is prepping a generation of kids to go out into the workforce without knowing the first damn thing about how to find and use relevant and credible information, much less care–why bother, i’ll just ask AI. the fact that it’s so often dead wrong doesn’t matter–it just needs to look correct. done. next.