Commentary
The exam hall shouldn’t be a time machine: Don’t ban AI
Forcing students back to pen and paper won’t fix what AI has broken in education. Only reimagining education will.
Seven per cent. That is the lecture attendance figure reported by a senior lecturer at the University of Western Australia, reported earlier this year.
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I disagree fundamentally. Not all jobs require AI. Many require knowledge, empathy, people skills, and agility. Creating an AI-dependent generation of students may work in some fields like coding in computer science, but not in jobs requiring critical thinking, and people management, as in many institutions and working in far-flung parts of the world where computers are not available, and in the caring professions.
I will continue to use paper and pen for exam assessment [bearing in mind that students are losing the ability to write in this way, and hate my exam, because 80% are cheating using AI on written assessments as you say, I guess]. For social scientists like me who rarely or never use AI ourselves, we have little alternative to written long form assessments, testing the ability to formulate and express and evidence based argument, and we will continue to fight the use of AI and call it out – because it isn’t permitting student learning, or certainly far less of it.
“And we want to solve this by confiscating their tools and handing them a ballpoint pen?” yes. definitely.
On knowledge generation through research outputs, I also run a journal with a lot of submissions and have done so for over 20 years. AI assisted articles, which we do not encourage, still contain referencing mistakes and phantom authors, and bland and incorrect sentences, which are not picked up by authors. The same lit reviews and references are recycled in many of othese submissions.
Good writing in any language is still a necessary and appropriate skill for both students and researchers. And AI does not do fieldwork, in my field, either.
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