Universities say AI cheats can't be beaten, moving away from attempts to block AI

Alistair Dent, Chief Strategy Officer at Profusion

Education is the single most exciting possibility for generative AI. It has the potential to transform one of the most important things a country can do to develop in the future: improve its citizens' education levels.

It is tempting to see education as a route to employability, but outside of specific professions (doctor, physicist, etc) lots of us do jobs that aren't related to our higher education, and instead we fall back on our more basic knowledge: reading comprehension, logical reasoning, mathematics, etc. Raising attainment levels in almost any subject leads to better outcomes for an economy, producing smarter and more rounded citizens is always a plus.

Generative AI provides teachers with the most important tool they've seen since the overhead projector: a tutor for every student.

Mastery learning - a teaching technique where a student focusses on and proves comprehension in a building block of a topic before moving on to the next topic - consistently outperforms other learning methods (regardless of widely debunked "learning styles"), but it depends on significant amounts of one-on-one time between teacher and student. That way the teacher can pick explanation styles that suit the student, and can take the time to answer specific questions, giving them tests to ensure they've got a good handle on the subject before moving on.

We traditionally test student knowledge with a combination of essays and quizzes. Essays are becoming harder than ever to police. But the test isn't the purpose, the learning is. When AI provides better learning tools that damage one testing tool, the answer can't be to ban AI. As evidenced, that can't be enforced. Instead, we need to embrace the new teaching tools and work hard to produce the smartest generation ever. They'll thank us for it. Eventually.

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