‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/mar/10/ai-impact-professors-students-learning

176 points · 10 comments · view on lemmy.world

10 Comments

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TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 186d

ReverendIrreverence@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 186d (3 replies)

Saying "professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI" when Critical Thinking is not, at fucking all, taught in American schools is disconcerting.

paraphrand@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 186d

They are speaking at the higher education level. But I agree with the sentiment that it should be taught throughout k-12.

Doomsider@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 186d

Oh there was a plan to introduce it in high school and conservatives threw a fit because it would turn their kids against their shitty beliefs. It was scrapped and that was the last I heard about it.

Critical thinking should be taught in kindergarten and by second grade children should be able to use evidence to generate and defend basic beliefs.

SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 184d

Critical Thinking is not, at fucking all, taught in American schools is disconcerting.

Professors don't teach at secondary schools.

paraphrand@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 186d (2 replies)

As someone collaborating with faculty to produce higher education courses, even the professors are falling to the temptation of using AI to develop their curriculum and learning materials. And the results are across the spectrum from carefully considered to slop.

SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 184d

the professions are falling to the temptation of using AI to develop their curriculum and learning materials.

Yes, shit Profs are putting slop in course materials and they should be fired for doing so under basic rules of academic integrity.

ozymandias@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 186d

AI is a pretty great assistant if you already know how to do the thing it’s helping you with.
But it’s also great at looking like it’s coherent from a quick glance while being full of nonsense.
it feels unfair, that they can churn out what would take several hours to review in a couple minutes….
but then if you consider how expensive it is to humanity at large, it’s not cheap at all….
i think the punishment for slop should be greater than entirely plagiarizing something.
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this comment was generated by a human

reddig33@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 186d

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amio@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 186d

Was anybody doing any of that anyway?

plantteacher@mander.xyz · 1 pts · 184d

grading is easily solved

There are reasonable solutions to this, as mentioned in the article:

“Professors said they resorted to oral interrogations, handwritten notebooks and class participation for grading purposes. Some require students to submit transparency statements describing their work process. Others have reportedly injected random words like “broccoli” and “Dua Lipa” into assignments to confuse learning models – exposing students who did not even read the prompts before pasting them into AI.”

The grading is quite solvable. Even for essay writing. You can put them in a room with disconnected PCs. Make the room a Faraday cage, if needed. Submitting papers that were supposedly “written” at home is a convenience of the past -- something that must be dispensed with, at least as far as grading goes.

Grading can be scrapped as well, anyway. Why grade? The only good reason for a school to grade someone is so the student knows for themselves how they are doing. An A, B, C, etc is not great. Students should get granular feedback on every answer they gave. The student knows themself whether or not they cheated.

Grades that are used for external purposes like showing your GPA to a prospective employer -- that’s a misuse of grading. Employers are increasingly fools to trust grades as an indicator of fitness for the job. Employers should do their own appraisal. That’s their job, not the school’s job. Some profs have been very outspoken about this long before AI hit hard. Now their stance has just become even more important.

So grading is not a problem for the school. Appraisal is the employer’s problem.

Grants and scholarships need to get creative

The only real problem for grading is where it’s used in a competition for grants and scholarships. The competition can no longer be based on essay submissions from the outside. It has to be done in a controlled environment where applicants appear in person and do something oral or write on a spontaneous topic under observation.