The Pressure for Students To Use AI Is Worsening
At the expense of the institutions meant to uphold learning and training
Education is not learning.
Moreover, teaching differs from learning. You may rant the whole day in front of a class, but if they don’t feel you, you’re preaching to the wind.
Learning contains friction. It’s a battle with reality, updating your mental systems to understand foreign concepts. It’s later testing these concepts to validate their truth.
Education is not learning. It’s not even tutoring. The Bloom’s standard, despite its praised benefits, is the example of wisdom calling in the streets but without anyone paying it any mind, like the lecturer preaching to the wind.
Institutions will still ensure they open spaces for new enrolment every year. It’s a business. One that produces low-agency individuals, converting them into almost similar products, fitting 95% of the heads who walk through its gates.
Once you get an admission or registration number, there’s a natural pressure to perform. It could be your lifelong status as the bright one, or the fear of being thought of as dumb. Most of my classmates in medical school confessed to fearing failure so much that it could choke their sleep.
The options were taking extra hours outside class to understand the subject. Alternatively, you could get a mentor. Students would then, at the very least, pass their exams, proud of their efforts.
Speaking to one of the professors who came to see his patients one evening, I asked him how the interviews he confirmed he was conducting that day went. This is my usual way of engaging the consultants, a friendly side talk, to alleviate the need to always focus on the patients and morbid disease states.
He told me how the applicants were a strange bunch. Online applications were pristine. In person, the applicants were worlds apart.
And once AI got into the game, the pressure worsened.
When the measure becomes the target
Academia has been gamified.
When I finished my first degree, my supervisors pressured me to publish my findings. It turns out that as an affiliate author, it boosts their h-index. Scientists are regarded by most institutions by their h-index. The higher, the better. But this can be circumvented by collaborating with several scientists.
I include you in my paper, and you include me in yours. We continue that over time, and our h-index improves faster than dragging it along by yourself. Professors, thus, have been trapped by the same trap seen among students.
When the measure becomes the target, it ceases to become a good measure. Grades, prizes, or an affiliation with a society can be the target of any individual in an academic institution.
Back to the conversation with my professor, where he dissected a tumorigenic problem in medicine. Before the 20th century, he reiterated how the University of Nairobi would boast of producing the biggest doctors. Once they were trained for their undergraduate course, they would have almost a similar number apply for graduate training.
The system could accommodate the numbers. Today, it can’t.
Through the biggest institutions at the time, Kenyatta National Hospital and the University of Nairobi, the Nairobi region could have, for instance, 20 slots for graduate students. Different departments would amount to somewhat similar numbers of students sponsored by the government.
Thinking about these numbers took me back to my first-year class. We were around 127 module one students. The rest, over 300+, were module two students — that is, self-sponsored students.
If each of the 120+ students had decided to pursue their graduate studies, twenty per department could suffice. One bunch in internal medicine, another in orthopaedics, another in radiology, yet another in general surgery, and the rest spread out in the remaining specialties.
But when you already have an overflow of 300 in the first year, the number continues to swell with every graduation. The capacity to accommodate these students doesn’t increase as much. Yet, the institutions would continue priding themselves as leading pillars of education.
Recall, education is not learning.
At the expense of friction, the education system creates a conveyor belt of students and continues to raise the tuition fees because ‘education is the key to success’.
But for you to succeed, you need to get the desired grade. For these individuals who were to be interviewed by the only professor I have referred to in this piece, they needed to meet the qualification criteria. And this can be gamed.
Thank you, AI and the Internet.
When grades are the measure, they cease to be a good measure. When everything turns online, how do you ensure reduced cheating? It’s difficult. Teachers will always be less tech-savvy than the students.
A student will pass, but they will not learn. They will get all answers online or from ChatGPT. The recent MIT study shows that the essays written by the AI users are generally longer than those of non-users. So, of course, they may score more marks, because length can be used as a surrogate marker for depth. Depth implies research. Research means you took your time. “This must be a hard-working student,” thinks the teacher. Meanwhile, the same student has planned a mean bender for the weekend, having completed their assignment after a few minutes.
All this is common.
But what about the pressure?
If everyone is using AI to bypass the viscous hill of learning, why shouldn’t you? Because, likely, your hard-earned work will not be appreciated by the lecturer. It will be riddled with typos, may suffer from a lack of structure, or not get sufficient referencing or depth if it’s an essay.
Because everyone does it, you risk appearing stupid. Telling the lecturers that your classmates are not doing extensive research is simply admitting to your supervisors that you’re a snitch. Students will know. You will be ostracized even more, and what’s more, you may not even pass despite these efforts. Why?
My classmates would always remind each other of the bell curve. The teaching staff has to find a few people to sacrifice. So students don’t strive to learn; they work hard to ensure they are far from the slashing tail of that distribution.
You may attend all the seminars, webinars, take your time understanding the tomes your lecturers suggested, but you’re competing with a brain that uses silicone chips and has amazing search power. Can you keep up?
Some students would not imagine their village sending them to school, or the level of sacrifice back home, only for them to fail. Ideally, it’s not failing, it’s simply not being on the right side of that unforgiving axe that slashes a proportion of students only because the department has to fail a couple of them.
The measure of using grades has worsened due to AI. And departments insisting on upgrading their systems to detect AI-written content don’t help much. These negative balancing systems create more incentives for students to find other means to bypass such checks.
The pressure is indeed getting worse for students. I recall when I was in my fifth year of medical school. We were the first group of students to resume physical classes, and it started with a CAT. It was supposed to be online.
I felt I needed to test myself and gauge whether I covered up for all the times I slept during the online lectures. I knew I wouldn’t fail, so I had enough room to experiment. Unlike other schools, medical school doesn’t really care much about your grade. The ultimate test is the patient.
We did the CAT, and the results came out. I passed. Very well, admittedly, but not that well relative to my classmates. I had a 75, a distinction. Most of my classmates ranged in the upper side of 85, with a significant number having over 90.
I’m not a fan of snitching, but the logic one of them gave me forms the basis of this article. If everyone is doing it, don’t you risk being caught by the unforgiving, pruning sickle if they were to draw that bell curve? I was definitely on the wrong side of the curve. Instantly, the pressure hit me.
And this was before the AI platforms gained the power they currently have. You can hear the song playing in the background:
Don’t push me, cause I’m close to the edge
I’m trying not to lose my head
And indeed:
It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder
How I keep from going under
Well, not me, but students.
Education has already failed to deliver what it promised. It’s now not just a factory, but a world-class spot for dating and meeting your spouse. Since they were smart enough to get into college, they are definitely somewhere in the 5th percentile. As Rob Henderson cites:
The college sorting machine has replaced traditional arranged marriages.
But if this smart bunch comes together, understands the consequences of not passing their exams, don’t you think they will use AI simply because every other person will use it? You can’t defend your answer by saying you didn’t use AI. You’ll look stupid. That’s the last impression you’d want your lecturer to have of you.
What I’m trying to say is…
The gamification of education worsens the conditions of students.
The rapid immediacy of task completion thanks to AI means students will use it to pass their exams. Resorting to AI-detection systems doesn’t help at all.
AI can be used in other ways to improve learning. But remember, learning is not the same as education. In this case, removing the examinations can have a greater impact than insisting on them. Reading College prides itself on being one of the campuses that doesn’t grade its students. Small wonder its products are only bested by institutions such as Caltech.
I’m a big fan of Brilliant, which makes learning fun and challenging, using the upsides of gamification without pitting one student against another.
Until such changes are actively pursued, the pressure will continue to worsen.
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube