Walk into a university classroom today. You can feel that something is not quite right. There is a kind of nervousness in the air. It is not something that you can easily notice. It is there lurking beneath the surface of everyday lectures and homework assignments. A new survey of than 1,000 faculty members from all over the United States has some numbers that show what people are really thinking. Over 90 percent of faculty members say they are worried that generative AI tools are making students less able to think for themselves. Almost all of the faculty members are afraid that students are becoming too reliant, on these tools.
For instructors this is not about being scared of technology or saying no to it. It is about what the instructors see every week. The students write essays that sound very good but feel empty. They do summaries that get the idea but do not really understand the main point. The students can give answers fast. They have a hard time when the instructors ask them to explain the essays and the summaries and how they came up with the answers, to the essays and the summaries.
Ann Mills, a professor who teaches writing and critical thinking in California says we have a problem, with learning. This is not because students are using things to help them learn but because these things make it easy for them to avoid the hard work that you have to do to really learn something. Ann Mills thinks that struggling is not a thing when it comes to learning. She believes that struggling is actually the point of learning.
People are saying the thing. Bryan Alexander, who works with teachers at schools thinks that people are really worried about this. He talks to librarians, people in charge of departments and even people, on the board of the university. A lot of them feel like they are stuck in the middle they know that Artificial Intelligence is a part of student life now and they are scared that it is taking away the skills that universities are supposed to teach to students.
The survey makes it very clear that people have feelings about this. Most teachers say they talk about Artificial Intelligence literacy in their classes. They discuss things like information, bias, privacy and how accurate something is.. Only a few teachers actually use Artificial Intelligence tools all the time when they are teaching. Some of the responses were very honest. One teacher said that Artificial Intelligence takes away, from what it means to be human. Another teacher said they would only use Artificial Intelligence if they wanted their work to look like it was done by a student who did not really care.
What has changed is not the way students write but the way students read. Teachers are saying that students do not pay attention for a time and they do not really get into complicated texts. It is easy to read a summary that someone made in a few seconds.. One person in charge of education said that just getting the main idea is not the same, as really thinking about students and the way reading and writing and complex texts and ideas change the way students think about things. Students need to spend time with texts and ideas to really understand them and to let students and the ideas and the texts change the way students think.
Cheating is a problem now. Most teachers think that getting a computer program to write a paper is definitely cheating.. What about other things? Is it okay to use a computer program to check if your references are correct?. To help you make your draft better?. To help you make a plan for your paper? A lot of the time people do not agree, in the same school department. The old rules do not work anymore. New rules are hard to accept. Cheating is still an issue and people are trying to figure out what is allowed and what is not allowed when it comes to cheating and using computer programs, like artificial intelligence to help with school work.
Technology does not seem to be doing much to help. These detection tools are just not reliable. Going back to exams might feel nice and remind us of the past but it is not a practical solution. Giving presentations can solve some of the problems we have but it also creates new ones. The problem is that things like scale and anxiety and accessibility get in the way. Technology and detection tools and oral presentations they all have their issues. There is no answer, to this problem that we can just use to fix everything.
The interesting thing about the survey is what the teachers think about their own actions. A lot of teachers are okay with using Artificial Intelligence to help them write their class plans or talks. Some teachers even think it is fine to use Artificial Intelligence for writing papers at work. The students have noticed that this is a problem. If it is getting more common for people to use Artificial Intelligence to write things in areas of life then it will probably happen in the classroom too. The classroom will not be the place where people do not use Artificial Intelligence to help them write. Artificial Intelligence is changing the way people write and the classroom is not immune, to this change.
What is happening now is not a breakdown but a time to think about what is going on. Universities are being made to consider what thinking really means when assistance is always available with one question. Some rules may be necessary even if they seem limiting. This is not to be hard, on the students but to safeguard the area where hard work turns into knowledge and understanding of the universities and their students.
The fear among faculty isn’t really about machines. It’s about losing something quiet and essential. The slow, sometimes frustrating process of learning to think for yourself.
