AI has exposed age-old problems with university coursework | Letter
TL;DR
Dr. Nafisa Baba-Ahmed argues AI has not created new problems in universities, but exposed long-standing weaknesses in assessment design.
Key Points
- Essay mills, shared model answers, and over-reliance on tutors predate ChatGPT by years.
- AI has industrialised the outsourcing of thinking – it did not invent it.
- Rather than romanticising a pre-AI past, universities must rethink what they actually want students to demonstrate.
Nauti's Take
Finally someone states it plainly: AI is not the villain, it is the mirror. Universities spent years pretending that bought essays were edge cases, while the system was quietly optimised for exactly that behaviour.
Blaming ChatGPT now is like ripping out the smoke detector because the noise is annoying. The uncomfortable task is not to ban AI from lecture halls, but to honestly ask why so many students reach for shortcuts in the first place.
Sources