Browse Comments — Clean (de-noised)

Academia condemns students for graduating without reading books, while quietly using AI to evaluate papers and monographs without reading them. The scandal is not artificial intelligence; it is institutional hypocrisy.

AI seriously disrupts the business model of academia. For decades, many academics have hidden behind abstruse language, arcane citation rituals, and credentialism to create artificial moats around knowledge. AI tears down those barriers in seconds. The outrage is not really about students becoming less intelligent. If academic standards were the concern, where were these people when grade inflation became the norm? Where were they when universities kept expanding intake to bring in more tuition revenue? Where were they when degrees became products and students became customers? Academia loves to market itself as a meritocracy, but anyone who has spent enough time around universities knows that networks, patronage, academic lineage, departmental cliques, and ideological tribes often matter as much as talent. Brilliant people are routinely excluded because they lack the right supervisor, the right institution, or the right connections. Many academic careers are built as much on who you know as what you know. What AI threatens is not learning. It threatens gatekeeping. It threatens the ability of a small class of experts to act as custodians of knowledge and arbiters of legitimacy. The whole noise is about protecting business.

Unfortunately, even before this AI has appeared, many ( perhaps most ) students graduated without reading a book. The question is what do people read these days? Only a small intellectually inclined elite reads anything substantial at all. The internet killed reading long time before generative AI. The issue now is that people do not read anything deep, just headlines and bullets on powerpoint and many students think that learning is all a about memorizing sentences, problem patterns, and blackbox procedures. This has proven to be the best strategy to get maximum grades. This model is not sustainable in the era of AI. We got to be more ambitious, and keep challenging the potential of the best students.

Dr. Razali Koroh how does she not understand? If someone doesn't read the relevant texts for their degree, they absolutely should not be awarded that degree.

Not good degrees I suppose

Daniela Tavasci Ps get degrees!

Atiqul Basher saw this!

This is almost certainly the case in tuition-fee-based models, where students are treated primarily as paying customers. Fortunately, many institutions outside the Anglosphere don’t operate this way.

Soooo sad 😭

Why not just create your own AI that you allow students to use that trains its self only on valid information. Then they would be reading the books but in a way that makes sense! Quite frankly it’s about being able to ask a question and get a reasoned answer. Also academics can be eletist and deem books are the only way to learn ... they are not and some books are just plain wrong! Our learning moves on faster than books are developed we need to move with the times and allow learning in all forms .

Once they secure more experience, they will appreciate that any student submission is subject to scrutiny- with any incidence of plageurism or copying noted, and students could be expelled.

But they won't have learned anything so they've wasted all of that money.

What matters isn’t reading books for the sake of it, it’s the knowledge you actually gain. Some elite academic thinking could use a serious update. We’re not in the 19th century anymore, and knowledge doesn’t live exclusively in books.

Counterpoint: books are long and boring and I don't like to read.

All content from all books, including those which intersect wirh other subjects, could be merged in one folder which the estudent learns from organically. I never understood why some courses restrict their learning experience to one book.

My experience is a literature professor: this was happening, Long before AI.

Yep !!

Olu Olojo I have used AI in my literature courses to great effect. I’ve asked students to, for example, make an ROI report on when Sinbad should have stopped voyaging, creating infographics on Demons in the Ramayana (and checking them against the actual text), interviewing Gilgamesh, and working as a fashion designer for the Wife of Bath. My students reported that these assignments brought them deep into literature and made them want to read and investigate further than they would normally have done.

Dr Rodolphe Ocler At times it's not simply about spotting AI work, which is also getting increasingly more difficult, especially if you are co-writing with AI and you know the limitations and pitfalls. The biggest issue is proving the student used it, which is much more difficult, assuming the assessment doesn't allow for the use of AI beyond brainstorming and proofreading. If a student simply says "i didn't use it" and knows the work well, how could you label it as academic misconduct or plagiarism? What proof would you have to the contrary?

Maybe we should talk to them more.