Browse Comments — Raw (as collected)

Professor John Hearn I think that at the PhD level we have the instrument to cross-check. Yearly VIVA, final VIVA, supervisors' expertise are enough. It will probably put a clamp on random PhDs that were self-funded that we got onboard on topics we do not care about and we do not have time/interest to learn. And it will probably restrict a bit the topics, and methodologies. The masters level is trickier because the numbers go up. So probably a call for removing thesis at the masters level, or having dual track masters, in which the thesis can be done only by students with top grades and it will require a domain restriction. The thesis cannot be about anything, it can only be about a topic we have an expert on, that wants to monitor the student.

Victoria Sterling I'm not sure I could be less interested, but thank you.

Helen Shaw If students don't provide in-text page numbers, I ask them to resubmit.

Paolo Spada Good ideas. I woukd be happy for Masters to be closed book.

Really interesting post, thank you. It does bring into the spotlight what we are trying to achieve and how important the relationships are between learner and facilitator of learning?

Yes, lots of rethinking to do. At the school of collective intelligence in Rabat they are doing a wonderful seminar on AI and learning that I sadly cannot attend and they have been sharing interesting articles on learning in the teams chat I follow while I grade the 30 essays from my class: ·       AI-induced never-skilling in medical education: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04438-y ·       On the opposite side of the debate, the historical development of ‘cognitive offloading’ in education systems https://stefanbauschard.substack.com/p/institutionalized-education-as-cognitive ·       On what we mean by learning: Deescalating the AI Learning Debate - by Nick Potkalitsky https://nickpotkalitsky.substack.com/p/deescalating-the-ai-learning-debate

William Waites I am really currious to hear from the Academic Integrity officers that will work on this wave of assessments and dissertations because the agentic revoluction, claude cowork/code, and OpenAI codex have diffused very recently and they offer a new level of options that are starting to percolate down to students. It is probably a minority of students using them effectively, but I found a few in my narrow sample of dissertations, if you extrapolate from that it should be around 20-30%. And they generate a new level of complexity in academic integrity forensic, as I explained in other replies, they can be used to avoid mechanical fake references, but concept stretching and erronous content hallucination requires manual checking that might slip through, and might actually be harder for the student to spot even if they read the source because they are trusting the AI so much thet they might end up missunderstanding the source.

Frederick S. Ahiabor, PhD I completely agree. The solutions exist, but adopting them requires changes of procedures and behaviour that are institutionalised and are actually at the basis of important business models that generate lots of revenues (the UK masters for foreign students for example).

Gavin D. in my current sample more than old research is weird open source authors, masters dissertations, and other strange sources. But that is actually very easy to fix by modifying the prompts, and some students that have clearly used AI now have mechanically good references, from good sources, what they quote from them remains sketchy, because the content needs understanding and they do not always spend the time with the source to understand the reference/quote.

Stefano Caserta really interesting, I oscillate between similar feelings and more positive takes https://stefanbauschard.substack.com?utm_source=navbar&utm_medium=web and https://nickpotkalitsky.substack.com?utm_source=navbar&utm_medium=web

those aren't lit review