As I write this, my students are taking an in-person exam on Chinese Politics. Three hours, closed book, no computers, pencil and paper. It's Saturday morning. I am sitting outside a lecture hall, and they are emerging, slowly, with cramped hands, glad to be done with the test and the semester.
I have been teaching for over ten years, and this is the first time I have ever done this sort of exam. My final has always been an open book take home test, where students have an eight-hour window to answer a few longer essay questions. If I gave that exam now, with some gentle prodding, Claude or ChatGPT would be able to produce A+ answers. A student could feed them the exam, syllabus, and lecture slides, and in two minutes they'd have back perfect essays. That would not have been the case two years ago.
Want to crawl into a pit of despair about the future of teaching and learning? Spend 10 minutes looking up student tools for the AI age. Just a few months ago, Companion.AI launched a new "homework agent" which could directly interface with Canvas, the system through which most universities produce course websites. The AI could log into Canvas, watch lectures if they were recorded, do the readings, and upload assignments on time. It could even participate in discussion boards. It was called: Einstein.
"Set him up and forget about it. Einstein checks for new assignments and knocks them out before the deadline."
Fully automated cheating.
After a backlash and a cease and desist letter, Companion.AI wound up deleting the product and website. It's unclear whether the whole endeavor was a publicity stunt or a flimsy attempt to make a quick buck, but it revealed something deeper about the challenge we face in education: the moral fabric of universities is on the precipice of breaking down.
Universities run on what we might call "integrity tasks" — little pieces of work that are expected to be done honestly, by a person, but with minimal policing and oversight. When a student is asked to write a paper, that's an integrity task, the expectation being that they do the work themselves. When a journal asks for peer review, the professor is expected to read the article themselves and write a thoughtful letter. When a department chair asks a full professor for a tenure letter, that professor is expected to spend one or two days reading the candidate's work, and then to write a lengthy 3-5 page assessment.
A key through line is that these tasks are time consuming. I would say I spend about 20% of my time evaluating other people — letters of recommendation, tenure evaluations, journal reviews. Add in grading and other feedback on student work, it's probably closer to 40% of my working hours. In the profession, the whole month of August is known as letter writing season.
AI introduces a gigantic moral hazard in that it substantially reduces the time taken to complete these things, if the person is willing to let an LLM do it for them. For students, an essay that would have taken away a beautiful Sunday afternoon can be completed in minutes. Professors are not immune from these temptations either…
